


Scrimscrim

by Kyn



Category: The Indian in the Cupboard Series - Lynne Reid Banks, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Gen, Grooming, Hurt/Comfort, Realism, Seekers, Tiny Transformers, Tiny!Formers, tinyformers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 12:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 43,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22849831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyn/pseuds/Kyn
Summary: In which the protagonist accidentally brings a Transformers action figure to life, and he - is -pissed.Even at less than a foot in height, Starscream is an absolute menace.
Comments: 292
Kudos: 393





	1. The Key

**Author's Note:**

> Our tiny Decepticon takes until the end of the first chapter to show up. You are _absolutely_ free to skip to that point, see if you like where this is going, and then come back here to read from the beginning later. Don't worry. I won't hold a grudge. I know exactly how people feel about OCs. You do you, reader. You read in the order you want to read in.

_Nothing_ was more upsetting than picking up a toy only to realized gold plastic syndrome, the family golden retriever, a younger sibling, or a malicious act of God had just broken it.

Wait, back up: There were obviously much more upsetting things in the world than _toy-breakage_. Yeah. Granted. But those were all _real problems_ and therefore outside the scope of this discussion. See, the things which tended to make life worth living were one's _chosen problems:_ Gold medals, tricky relationships, company promotions, fame and adulation, or—in Samantha's case— _hobbies_.

And when one's hobby was collectibles, and if one just so happen to like to handling one's collectibles, one simply had to worry about them breaking. 

Thus it came to pass, that when Samantha B. Patterson carefully took inventory of her Transformers Prime action figures, and saw a right arm was missing, she tried not to panic.

Even if she'd specifically taken these boxes _in her car,_ and hadn't let the movers touch them. Even if she'd lovingly wrapped each figure in bubble wrap. Even if she'd taken them straight from one bedroom to another and unpacked them as quick as possible to get them safely back up on a shelf again.

_Shit._

No, no! This was okay. It was _going to be_ okay. Deep breaths.

The damage had occurred partway up the arm, somehow, and not at any of the vulnerable joints. The plastic there was rather thick across. Sam could fix this, she could; she'd fixed toys like this before. Couldn't fix it exactly _now,_ though, because her figurine repair kit was crammed somewhere at the bottom of a hastily packed box. And, to be honest, she had a lot of other projects to churn though if she wanted to modernize this dumpy single floor suburban cottage into something habitable.

Okay. Furniture and demolition for now... Toy repair tonight?

Sam gave the figurine a twice-over, checking it and it’s neighbors to make sure she hadn't missed any cracks or stress marks or additional (queerly) amputated limbs. Nothing. She picked up the lone afflicted toy and brought it with her into the garage.

* * *

The remains of the hideous dining room hutch and half the kitchen cabinets laid sprawled out in front of the roadside garbage bin, daring her to either refurbish them or else condense them into small enough splinters to avoid a long series of fifteen dollar special garbage pickup fees.

The cabinets might be salvageable, if she could just sand them down and get a better look at the grain. The hutch? Nope. She'd cleared it out earlier. There'd been surprisingly fine crystal mixed with a children's set of plastic teacups; and silverware which might have actually been silver, next to plastic forks. The whole house seemed to be equally mercurial in quality, and, as far as Sam was concerned, the lady who'd owned it however many years back had probably been a little crazy.

Which was fine. It meant she'd make back a little in costs on eBay, later.

Anyway! Might as well take the first of several trips to Home Depot. In addition to a carefully pruned list of power tools she needed to make sure she could afford, Sam needed a sledge hammer. No, 'need' wasn't quite accurate, ahem: she _wanted_ a sledge hammer. There were other ways to mow through cabinets or remove a wall partition, but 'sledgehammer' was categorically the funnest. This was going to be like shop class back in vocational school. 

"Sorry Starscream," she apologized as she found the toy a spot on the garage shelves, started to leave, felt guilty, turned back, and arranged him _properly_ so he'd be able to stare down and watch her work and provide silent criticism. "I'll get some epoxy resin for you at Home Depot, fix you up later tonight, and leave it to cure till morning, Kay?"

Toys, sadly, could not talk back; but it was entertaining to imagine his miniature indignation as if in Toy Story or The Little Princess: Goodness gracious, down an _arm_ ; If Megatron could see this he'd be a laughing stock! Where was Knockout?!

* * *

It was about ten hours of home improvement later, the weather outside was taking a turn for the worst. The wind howled. The rain kicked up. And then power went out.

It wasn't night outside, or at least it shouldn't have been, but with the storm clouds thick and heavy, the poor sun was nearly blotted out prematurely. Not to be outdone by a force of nature, Sam busted open cardboard box after cardboard box until her cell phone helped her locate a shamefully large collection of scented candles.

Something something something, impulse control purchase problems. When it came to collecting things, Samantha had more than one poison.

Tasteful candles soon crackled helpfully around her abode, scented everything from wintertime evergreen to Brazilian coffee, all seated in thick glass mason jars and set far enough from that dubiously ancient wallpaper to keep themselves out of 'fire hazard' territory.

"You've bought yourself a fixer-upper," Sam confirmed, quite content in that knowledge. It meant she could do anything she damn well wanted with it.

Sam decided to head out of the kitchen and into the garage. A hutch around here was scheduled for a _timely_ demise. It was old, but not antique, it was plain and square, It was ugly, and it had _met it's unmaker_. She slipped on some heavy gloves, and a pair of plastic safety goggles, because if there was one thing you didn't want to do to yourself while the power was out it was to end up with wood splinters and glass shards in your eyes. 

She hefted the sledgehammer up high. 

* * *

Smashing things was so. damn. cathartic. Mmmmnnnnnnh! Everyone should find an excuse to do it, once in awhile. Just to break something, anything, so long as it was at the end of the road and no one was going to miss it.

Sam's first two hits weren't as impressive as she'd hoped they'd be, but she stepped back, rolled her shoulders, and hit again! And again! There was an upper display area for crystal ware, a middle area with drawers, and a lower cupboard that probably had once contained candle sticks or table clothes.

Heck, maybe it _still_ contained those things. She'd cleaned out the upper two levels, but there had been a keyhole on the bottom cupboard, and into that keyhole had been thrust a key and—who would have guessed after four years of abandonment?—the whole key-plus-keyhole had rusted together and now couldn't be turned or opened.

Sam was interested in what treasures it might contain. Plastic or glass? Toss a coin!

CRACKLE.

Oooookay, Sam had definitely punched through the roof of the lower cupboard. She peeked in. She couldn't see much, so she kicked away the upper parts of the hutch, levered them free with her crowbar, and then dragged the bottom cupboard over to inspect better with her candle.

Nhh. Hmm.

She got out her phone instead, even though her battery was dying.

Sam saw what looked to be a set of teacups nestled inside the cupboard. She reached in, and pulled it out, and was not exactly surprised to find they were made of what looked to be highly ornate and very old china. Thankfully _undamaged_ china!

Plastic teacups in the display section, china hidden in a cupboard. Honestly. This old lady. She'd been an interesting gal.

Sam hit the cupboard a few more times (crack, crack, crash!) only for a BOOM of especially loud thunder to make her jump. She looked up towards the roof. She laughed. The sky was echoing her.

Man. _Whoo!_

All that exercise had worked up a thirst. Samantha walked over to the side of the garage, bumped her shoulder on a shelf in the low lightning, leaned into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Powerade off the shelf. She gulped down hydration.

Her brain jumped back a step, to where she'd bumped the shelf:

Had she heard something fall, somewhat muffled under all the white noise of rain?

Oh _no_. Poor, poor Starscream. If he'd lost another limb on contact with the cold concrete floor, Sam was going to have nobody but herself to blame.

Sam took the Powerade with her, stepped back into the garage and, yup, sure enough: Missing toy. There was good news, though: He'd fallen into the broken hutch, and spongy wood chips had probably been a bit gentler on his delicate plastic body than concrete. Of course now she was going to have to find his arm in all that mess. She set aside her drink, got out her phone, flicked the light on—again—got her glove back on, knelt down over the corpse of the hutch cupboard, and reached in.

The first thing to break Samantha Patterson's train of thought was that something was glowing a neon color, like what happened if you broke open one of those those glow sticks people bought their kids at Fourth of July parties, so she did a double take.

The second thing to break her (new) train of thought was when that when her phone got over the lip of the hutch, she could see the crisp outlines of something moving, like a mouse, and it made her jump.

The third thing to break her (extra new) train of thought was the red pinpoints of light which locked on her like _eyes_.

Then the most piteously horrifying and dreadful _shriek_ filled the air, and if there hadn't been a thunderstorm boiling over in the heavens above them, everyone on earth from there to Timbuktu would surely have heard it. Sam recoiled in adrenaline and disbelief, stuck between half formed thoughts and realizations.

Realizations.

Sam dove forward again, reaching into the cupboard, pushing hands through tall splinters of wood, curling her fingers. The thing under her hands was hard and pointy, not slippery like a mouse, but it was writhing and _screaming_ in a voice that seemed terribly loud for something so _small._

She grabbed hold and pulled it out. Pain shot through her fingers with a burst of flame. She yanked her hand reflexively away, which ought to have led to her dropping him or outright flinging him across the room.

Uh-uh. Nope. Second Hand was on a mission: Second Hand sacrificed the iPhone without thinking, dropping it in a heartbeat to catch the flailing-shrieking- _flaming_ thing.

Flaming? Her first hand/glove was still on fire. _Afterburners_. She slapped the glove against the floor, rolled back on her ass, and stamped her heel on the edge of the glove to pull it off. Then there was another pain in Second Hand, despite its valiant sacrifice of the Lauded iPhone. No fire this time? No, but mean, mean pinpricks and a lot of splatters of blue, neon liquid.

"Stop it!" she shouted, grabbing with her naked fingers at the writhing mass of metal needles. " _Stop_ it!" Was there any way to grab it (him) that wasn't painful? "Ow!" Afterburners went off again but missed her gloves. Digital noises poured out of it in a cacophony of angry keens. " _STARSCREAM!_ "

For the briefest of moments, the tiny body stopped moving.

Samantha's fingers dove in there like an angry pincer, and she grabbed firmly ahold of the source of that blue neon liquid: An arm stump, gushing everywhere, with its internal details impossible to discern in this lighting. Now what? She couldn't bandage it. She couldn't stitch it. She couldn't tourniquet it. And if she tried pinching it shut with needle nose pliers, there was no guarantee it'd stop bleeding, because metal didn't typically make a watertight seal on its lonesome.

She looked all around herself. She saw the scented candle.

Samantha stood, pushed out the arm stump and, without any further thought given to the matter, pushed it straight towards the flame and into the molten wax.


	2. Occam's Razor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHH, FIRE.

A soul-churning _howl_ tapered off into labored silence. Liquid wax gleamed in the candle light, slowly losing its translucency as it thickened and hardened. The fire hadn't been hot enough to seriously damage metal. Clearly he'd expected something much more intense.

"Keep your arm raised," she breathed over top of tiny, labored sighs, her fingers still tightly pinching the amputated stub. He was trying to tug it free. "Keep your arm up. It needs to harden into a plug."

A writhing had started back up under her fingers. He was quickly working himself back up into a fit. Sam needed to put him down. _Now_. Before he could seriously hurt her. Before she could _drop_ him.

"You're okay." She slid to her knees, and leaned forward. "You're okay." She got him back on the concrete floor and opened her fingers, and lifted her hands away and to the sides. She scooted back. She stared.

He scooted away on palm and tush, metal scraping tinny against the rough floor, trying to escape the massiveness of her. He'd have been less than eight inches tall, if he were standing. He was curled in on himself, wings scissoring up and down with every scoot.

"What," he demanded, and— _oh_ _—_ his voice was everything Steve Blum had ever led Earth to believe it would be, "in the name of _Unicron's twisted spark_ are _you!?"_

"You're asking that question in English," Sam blurted, dizzy and sassy. "I gotta be human, right?"

" _Impossible,_ " spat a creature whose little body was all hard angles and crisp shadows. Thanks Power Outage. "The laws governing your primitive cellular reproduction would not allow a mere human to reach that height. You must be at least—"

"Six foot two," Sam completed, still high on adrenaline. "Yeah, I know, I'm enormous."

"Are you _mocking_ me!?"

"I'm not big," she rephrased, raising her hands to indicate: "You're tiny."

"Don't be ridicul—!" he began to insult, only to for the words to garble off into a stream of synthesizer noises. The little form scooted and twisted in place. His glowing red gaze swept left, and then up, and over tools like screwdrivers and pipe wrenches which were all half again as tall as he was. His wing posture deflated slowly to the floor. He continued to look, further and further around himself, until the massive door into the kitchen and steps fit for a giant had all driven home exactly how tiny he _was._

Sam looked around, too. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Her iPhone lay where it had fallen, flashlight illuminating only the ceiling. The candle still burned.

Nothing in her immediate surroundings seemed capable of bringing a toy to life. Not even Buzz Lightyear styled life, but _real life,_ complete with working jet engines, a complicated background story, and an alien vocabulary of vaguely bird-like robot noises. Was this the fault of the thunderbolt she'd heard seconds before it happened?

No. Sam's gaze fall to the tattered, sagging remains of the hutch cupboard. Cupboard. C-u-p-b-o-a-r-d. A wave of vertigo hit her mixed with vague recollections of important plot details in nineties films. She looked back to the tiny scrap of a robot who hadn't used her moment of brief distraction to evaporate or otherwise disappear. He was so _small._

Ho boy.

"What," red eyes turned on her, "...did you..." his voice rose into a shrill and pitchy snarl, _"Do - To - Me!?"_

 _"Do_ to you? You aren't even _real_ in this universe!"

"WHAT!?" he exploded.

"You're _fictional,_ you shouldn't exist."

" _I_ shouldn't exist!? What exactly—" he was rocking in place, maybe in an effort to stagger to his feet, "—are you trying to pull, here, Earthling?!"

"I'm just trying to explain how—"

"You're bluffing is what you're doing!" he interrupted with an accusatory point. "If I didn't exist, how would you know _my name_?"

"You're a super villain in a popular fictional children's story!" Sam argued. "Of course I know your name!"

Starscream balked, steaming out angry twitters and a single, tense, bubbling English word: _" 'Villain!?' "_

God, Sam has to bite her tongue not to blurt laughter. She sucked in a breath. "You're going to have to consider that humans are the target audience of this story."

"Why would _Earthlings_ write a story about the intricacies of Cybertronian warfare if—?!"

"Cybertron doesn't exist."

He recoiled.

"Giant robots don't exist. Humans are alone in the universe. We've never met an alien species. We make up stories about them because we’re bored and lonely. You have to be from another dimension or something. _You don't exist in this one_."

"You... you, you, you expect me to believe... that this is a dimension _solely of humans_... which just conveniently happens to randomly make up _true stories_ about Cybertronians from other dimensions?!"

"Do you have a better explanation for why you're eight inches tall and just appeared in the house of Random Human Number One billion and Thirty Seven?"

"Yes, in fact, I _do!"_ snarled the unsteady creature who tried to take an aggressive step her way and just ended up back on his knees with a tiny clatter.

Sam stiffened. "Caref—"

"—An _infinitely_ simpler explanation is that I have simply been transported and _mass displaced_ against my will, and that you are attempting to manipulate me into divulging something!"

"I can prove I'm not lying," she was sure. "Let me show—"

She'd reached for him but he snapped away from her. Both wings fanned out wide. He pointed his working arm straight in her direction. He defiantly raised his chin. The lighting was bad, and the details were hard to make out, but his posture and sound effects suggested he'd just primed a forearm missile.

"I'm just going to bring you to see my—"

"Don't you _dare_ presume to touch me, organic! _Ever._ "

Ohhhh, was this pitiful. But if the tiny monster had proven anything it was that he was as dangerous to pick up as an angry badger. Sam drew a blank on what to do next, looking around for some kind of brain aid. She saw her phone, grabbed it up, and flipped it over just to see the Apple logo show up as the battery hit critical and forced it into shutdown.

Great okay. Sam leaned forward on her knees and made to stand.

The tiny transformer scrambled and scooted farther back from her than ever.

"Don't panic," she said. "There's a bad storm outside and if you end up in trouble, no one is going to be able to _find_ , much less help you."

"Oh I assure you I do _just fine_ on my own."

Great. Strascream seemed the sort of character to bolt the instant he was outside of her direct supervision. He still thought he was in whatever universe he'd come from, which meant he might try to escape in search of help that _didn't exist._

And given Starscream's general luck in every continuity he'd ever existed in, Sam could easily see him crawling down a drainage pipe, getting swept into the sewer system, and dying a horribly undignified end buried in about six feet of human waste in a filtration plant somewhere.

Sam couldn't leave him alone like this, even for a second, even though the only way to prove her point would be to wave a bunch of toys in his face.

What to do. What to do. Aha!

She reached over alongside the kitchen door and hit the garage door opener. The door lurched with the sound of clunking gears and an ancient motor. Winds howled and blasted cold water into the mouth of the opening. Lightning crackled ominously outside. 

"It's bringing down trees and taking out power lines," she said after a moment of excellently well-timed thunder. "Your wings are barely six inches across. You could probably hold a single raindrop in the palm of your hand. I'm going inside the house for _two minutes,_ and if you aren't here when I get back, it probably means you're going to die alone and cold on a planet that has exactly zero energon on it."

Had that made a dent? The lights in here hadn't made facial features clear even at a close distance, and flickering shadows were making larger motions that he was. Maybe the lack of immediate rebuttal and/or insult was a good sign. No way to tell for sure; best to be swift. 

She stepped around him towards the screen door and bowled through her house. She made a B-Line for her bedroom. She grabbed the first box of toys in sight, turned around, hesitated, and then dug her hand in a box of bathroom supplies. Towels? Towels. She might need those. 

Sam surged back out of the bedroom, headed across her house, had a brief zoned-out moment (where she began wondering if her footfalls might be intimidating when one was only eight inches tall), and then emerged back in the garage. It had taken her one hundred and twenty seconds, tops. 

...Surprise, surprise:

No Starscream. 

_Are you kidding me?_

Samantha grit her jaw but then decided not to boil over. She'd left a tiny, untrustworthy, megalomanic coward on her floor, and, sure enough, he'd booked it. She'd known that it was going to happen, and now that it had happened, she had no right to be mad. Best case scenario: He wasn't far and had tucked himself between towering cardboard boxes to feel a little bit safer or sneakier.

Determined to prove that she wasn't crazy, wasn't lying, and that—yes—her fictional action figure had just been brought to life by falling headfirst onto the remains of a somehow-still-magical cupboard, Samantha walked back into the center of the garage, got down on her knees, and opened up that box of figurines. She pawed through them with much less care than she'd usually be willing to show her favorite possessions.

Uh. Was she going to try and bring something to life _right now_? Nope. No. No way. That experiment could come later. In fact, the 'proof' she was looking for was _the last possible character_ that Sam would choose to put in a room with a frightened and injured Starscream.

"Here!" she announced victoriously, before turning about to plant a fearsome Scourge of Kaon down in the near vicinity of Starscream's last known location. Voyager Class Megatron did not so much as wobble. Voyager Class Megatron was not the toy who struggled to stand upright upon his own two feet, _cough cough._ Sam sat back on her heels. She gestured with an open hand. "Have a look for yourself," she invited.

But at first, there was no response.

No voice. No movement.

Samantha could see the distant smear of energon on the ground. If she got on her hands and knees and tried to _follow_ , she might find a trail of tiny glowing droplets. But Sam hesitated, because she didn't just need to _find_ Starscream, she needed him to _believe_ her. She didn't want to push an already scared, injured, cowardly animal into full-blown _panic mode._ A giant human chasing after him, knocking boxes over left and right, didn't sound like it'd be winning over any hearts or minds.

The seconds ticked by. 

_Grr._

Sam glanced up at the shelving units above her ruined hutch. She reminded herself that she was probably _not crazy,_ and that this definitely didn't feel like a dream, and, anyway, toys coming to life would be an oddly specific thing to hallucinate.

Then a glimmer of metal caught the candle light, and Sam looked to it. A slender figure appeared, not by the boxes where she'd left him, but instead slumped against the side of the lawnmower.

Sam repressed the urge to squeal, shout victoriously, and/or cover her face and groan; out of everything Starscream had chosen to shelter under, he'd picked the giant sucking rotating death machine. Of course. Because why would his luck be any better in the real world, honestly? _Perish the thought._

"What," he growled in a husky tone of voice that quite possibly had to do with blood loss, "is that... _thing?"_

"He's made of plastic," Samantha explained of a hobby that had always been so much more to her than _plastic._ "He's a children's toy. Which, until about ten minutes ago—" she reached out and flicked it's shoulder with a dismissive aire she didn't really feel, "is what _you_ were."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can see it now: Starscream's going to hatch a harebrained plot involving a cupboard, an unnecessarily convoluted marble machine and that aforementioned lawnmower, and then when it inevitably backfires poor Sam'll have a tiny squealing flyboy hiding behind the toothbrushes as a miniaturized spawn of Unicron tries to run him down with a dinner knife.
> 
> No? That's G1 Starscream? Huh! Pity.


	3. Reach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam is like the person who figures out they're in a zombie movie before anyone else. Let's hope she doesn't get killed off as quickly!

"I don't... understand," Starscream finally said. 

Sam had been pointedly looking away from him. Not because he was disinterested in what he was doing, of course. She'd hypothesized the lack of direct eye contact might make Starscream a little bolder. Glancing back towards the lawn mower, she was pleased to be proven correct.

He'd stepped out to inspect the plastic figurine and was standing up as straight as his miserly inches allowed to study it. Doubtless, toys looked a lot rougher from two inches away than from arm's length. It was obvious it wasn't real. He prodded it in the chest. Voyager Class Megatron barely wobbled. (Such a sturdy toy! Such chunky footsies!) The wobbling still made Starscream flinch, which probably said something about the current state of their relationship. 

"Yeah," Sam had to agree, because she didn't understand either. "Last time I checked, toy figurines don't spontaneously come to life."

"I am _not_ some _toy!_ " he growled, glare snapping in her direction. Which might have been more intimidating if he hadn't been so distracted. He kept glancing at the plastic Megatron and leaning away from it, like he was positive it might start moving at any moment. "I have-I have been online for millions of your pathetic earth years," he chattered, attention still flicking back and forth, "l-long before ending up in this miserable state!" (Her, Megatron, Her, Megatron, Her, Megatron; Okay, this was mean of her, the poor thing couldn't focus.)

Sam reached over and grabbed the Megatron. Sam pointedly ignored how Starscream aimed a missile at her. She rolled the figurine back up in bubble tape, and got it back into the box.

A tiny robot's eyes flicked the box up and down. By the curious bob of his wings, he was wondering what else might be in there.

"Okay," she folded the cardboard back down to deny him exactly those answers. "Hear me out, this is going to sound stupid—"

"Stupider than everything you've said so far?"

"—but there's this other, equally fictional story I know of, where a kid accidentally brings a toy person to life by putting it in a magic cupboard. Only in this case it was implied to be a real Native American he just plucked clear out of history."

"A _whatnow_?"

"But maybe that bit isn't important, because I remember this brief scene where the protagonist really quickly crams a bunch of fictional toys into the cupboard thinking the result will be awesome, opens it, and stares in horror at it dawns on him how bad an idea that was."

"You are _ranting_ and it is not improving your _intelligibility!_ "

"Listen," Sam gesticulated (much to his dismay, woops), "before you got here, I was in the middle of destroying this ancient 'cupboard,' " she pointed at the splintered mess. "And you weren't real until you _fell into it."_

She could see enough of his features to make out his appalled gape. "Y-you expect me to believe that _you_ think the tattered remains of some _derelict piece of furniture_ have _magical powers!?"_ he demanded.

Sam shrugged helplessly, and tried reasoning by facial expression.

He made an utterly disgusted noise, threw up his hand, and looked about like he was searching for people to come witness the spectacle she was making of herself. "Well!" he turned back on her with a waggle of himself, and planted that hand mockingly on a hip, "I see they don't grasp basic laws of _science_ on this planet."

Samantha rolled her eyes at him and crossed her arms. "Okay smart guy, but what if I'm right? Then what?"

He made another utterly disgusted noise that sounded way messier than it had to be. He sounded _fatigued._ But. He also drew his little claws drawn up to his chin, like he was giving some additional thought to her explanation. " _Then_ you would be able to reproduce the experiment and get the same results."

"Well," Sam huffed, "I can tell you what we are not going to do. We are not going to grab anybody else out of their respective universes. At least not until we have some kind of plan for how to send them _back_."

"Excuse me, is my translator chipped fried? No? That is exactly what 'reproducing the experiment' entails, _simpleton!"_

"Smartass, I can think of exactly one way to make being stuck in this universe _shittier_ for you, and that would be if the only other person your size was actively attempting to murder you."

His posture scrunched inward and he didn't immediately answer. She imagined he was evaluating a long internal list of friends and foes, and quickly realizing the first list was almost empty, and that not many neural people would be happy to see him either. Plus: His _arm_ was missing. He wasn't particularly commanding, nor primed to win a dominance spat. He was _vuln—_

"Your arm!" Sam had an epiphany, and started to stand.

"W-what of it?" a toy-sized person growled, backing warily towards that lawnmower he'd incorrectly identified as a great hiding place.

Sam ran her hand along the shelf over the hutch, and came away holding a tiny, severed, plastic arm. Ooh, what a find. This might be all the proof she needed! She knelt quickly, looked to him, saw his hunched and fearful posture, and belatedly tried to work out how to get her prize close enough for him to inspect it. Without reaching towards him. Because Starscream was not a fan of the reaching. Starscream was repeatedly falling into a defensive stance any time her hand came near him.

Sam looked left. She looked right. She grabbed at a stack of newspapers she'd planned to use later when staining and refinishing wood. She placed the arm carefully on a sheet of newsprint, and then slid it across the floor to him, using it as a spacer so she could keep her distance.

"See that?" she asked.

Starscream's brows narrowed. His gaze flicked up to her like he expected a trick. Gingerly, he stepped forward, and reached down, and picked up the stiff polymer appendage. "Plastic," he confirmed, before dropping it back on the paper. For a second he seemed to struggle to stand back up, but that could have been a trick of the shadows.

"Let's see what happens," she conspired, and pulled the paper and limb back to herself. "At worse I just drop a piece of plastic into a broken cupboard and you get to insult me."

He muttered something in computer noises that probably amounted to 'I don't need permission to insult you.'

Sam scooted around the hutch, held the limb up over it, and... 

"Aren't you going to come and watch?" she asked.

"No thanks," he not-smiled with just his tone.

Sam scoffed. "You'll accuse me of hiding the plastic arm and switching it with a real one behind your back."

"You know, unlike you primitive Earth creatures, _I_ have excellent eyesight at a range."

Yeah, okay, but not _X-Ray vision,_ and a sagging cupboard door was kind of in his way. Sam rolled her eyes and leaned over to place the arm down.

Sadly, nothing happened. 

"Damn." This seemed a silly explanation for things, in retrospect. Starscream was right. "Well, there goes that theory-" she glanced away briefly, looked back, and then lurched forward and leaned upon her palms. "Never mind. Apparently I couldn't be looking at it?"

"Well!?" demanded an impatient toy-sized individual who genuinely couldn't see. "What are you babbling about! Did it change or not?!"

Sam reached into the cupboard, plucked out a now limp and floppy metal limb, and turned to serve it Starscream's way on a piece of newsprint. The severed end was still leaking Energon. 

Starscream squatted down slowly, apparently unwilling to be off his feet. He poked at the limb, and then picked it up by the elbow joint and lifted it for his inspection. Red eyes reflected off the very real metal of the exterior. She got the vague impression of a puzzled expression, but with his head down and the lighting pathetic, she couldn't be sure.

"Well that solves one mystery, but not our overarching problem," Sam was pretty sure, craning over her demolished hutch. "'Cause it seems one-directional. Things only go from plastic to real, not back the other way. And now it's in _pieces._ "

"This..."

Something was wrong with that tone. _It was too high._ Sam looked quickly back.

"This... can't be..." up and up and up his pitch went, twisting about and rasping to empty air at the top, "... _happening._ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adrenaline wearing off.


	4. Meltdown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took me -this long- to catch that the garage door opener wouldn't have worked if the power was out. Doh! Oh well, doesn't look like that broke anyone's immersion. Anyway, we can just mentally replace it with her throwing open the garage side door And pointing outward aggressively. If I ever go back and spruce things up, I’ll fix that.

"This _can't_ be happening."

Uh oh.

"This is impossible. It must be a glitched defragmentation cycle. S-some kind of simulator, something thought up by that _wretched_ MECH, some kind of game or punishment, a c-cortical psychic p-p—" Starscream lifted both arms lifted in some vain effort to cover or clutch at his head, but given that one hand was still holding the amputated remains of the other arm, the self-protective gesture came up pitifully short. 

Nothing about this looked good. "H-hey," Sam called.

"C-can't— _ssshhhii-k-k-k-iiiuuu—_ " he lost his grasp on English and started twittering up a storm of unintelligible beeps, screes, chirps, and clicks. 

"Look, it's really not as bad as—"

He was _absolutely_ not listening to her. Starscream was off in his own little world, voice pitchy, no doubt rattling a long list of possible alternative explanations for his current predicament. This whole nightmare wasn't going away fast enough, so he pivoted around to get away from the looming world. His sense of balance went screwy. One dainty foot staggered awkwardly out to the side, he over-corrected for that mistake with his wings and shoulders; and though he briefly straightened up tall, straight, and proud to re-establish control over gravity, that was followed _immediately_ by his joints going slack as he dramatically careened over to the side. 

Sam was just a second to late to catch him. Starscream clattered on the concrete with a belated yelp. She tried scooping him up, and that turned out to be the wrong idea; because when Starscream shook off the swoon and realized her fingers were closing in on him, he retaliated:

Needle-like fingers slashed open her naked thumb pad, accompanied by a loud, defiant _scream_. Sam yelped and snatched her hand back, biting on her thumb. And Sam might have learned her lesson and never grabbed for him again, had Starscream not immediately scampered away on hand and knees for the edge of that lawnmower. Her other hand was still gloved, so she slapped it down on top him, grabbing hard. He wouldn't stop screaming. He was a lot stronger than his size suggested, and holding him in place felt as impossible as restraining a rat.

"Oh for the love of Christ—!" Pointy feet kicked repeatedly at her palm and wrist. This was like being stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver. He'd wormed half under the lip. "You're trying to get under something stupid! Look _up_!"

He must have, and realized a death trap was directly overhead, because she heard a brief silence and a tiny gasp. She dragged him out. Claws shrieked on the concrete, loud enough for her to belatedly think of a _horror movie._ She got him off the ground. He needed to stop flailing like this, seriously, because he'd just fallen on his injured arm, and she needed to make sure the wax hadn't broken free—

WHOOSH. Samantha belatedly jerked her head back, flinching in response to the small projectile which had zoomed past close enough to brush her eyelashes. Something struck the garage wall behind her with a loud crack of wood debris bursting into the air. 

"Did you just shoot a _missile at me_!?" Every moment she and Starscream spent yelling at each other was another a moment for flailing claws to try and embed themselves in her skin. "I'm trying to _help_ you! Stop—"

Starscream spun up an afterburner and jammed it straight into her glove.

Sam— _shit_ —Sam nearly threw him.

But instead of throwing him, she grabbed up a towel, and she slapped him with it. Him, her hand, the whole point of contact. And again, and again, until there was no more cone of flame, and no more smoke. Each time the towel descended, the computer shrieks were briefly interrupted by a distressed muffle. 

"Don't you _dare_ —" slap, "ever light me—" slap, "on fire—" slap, "AGAIN! Do you hear me!? Huh!?" She was shoving him down on top of a cabinet, now, fighting him to get him to look at her, but he wasn't having _any_ of this, no sir. He kept rolling to get on his stomach, kicking furiously. For all of five seconds he was deathly quiet, minus the sounds of exertion. She _did not let him up._ Then he keened into the wood like she was _violating him,_ and that was so much more awful than any of his accusatory screams had been.

She released him, half because his sustained fight was inducing psychological fatigue, and half to get her glove off and see how bad that burn had been. Did he hold still for her, then? Nope. He clawed his way across the cabinet, tiny nails leaving pinpoint tracks in the wood.

Sam threw the towel down upon him! He tucked his wings and rolled to slash at her with his claws, but this was exactly the opening she needed. She pressed the towel down on all sides of him trapping his arms and wings. He trashed. She rolled him over and continued. He wiggled. She folded him up with towel on all sides. And lo: Sam picked up her freshly burritoed Starscream, and saw that it was good. 

The burrito _vehemently_ disagreed.

"You're alright," she growled at him.

Nope, still shrieking angry robonoises at her. She presumed these were curse words.

"You're alright," she grumbled, pulling him closer to her and folding him to keep those jet engines pointed away from her body. 

The steady stream of robot profanity did not let up. Her burrito was outraged at this treatment. Outraged! And the world would tremble before that outrage!

"You're being ridiculous," she mumbled guiltily, trying to work out where his arm was so she could check on it. "Absolutely ridiculous. And if any of your armada could see you right now, they'd be embarrassed. That's how ridiculous you are being."

Ooh-hoo-hoo, nothing she'd previously said or done got Starscream to choke off to silence quite like that. It wasn't even entirely _fair,_ either. Any human would be well within their rights to act like this, if they were to find themselves in the custody of a giant robot. 

"I need to check on your arm," she broached.

He made a bit of noise, halfheartedly wiggling. He seemed unwilling to light _himself_ on fire, at least, so her towel wasn't at risk.

"I'm not trying to hurt you." She'd found the side of his teeny waist... Her thumb slid up over the towel, looking for his chest. She almost forgot he'd cut her, and was surprised to see little blots of red left behind. Hoo, that could use some hydrogen peroxide.

 _"L-leave it!"_ he demanded, which was an improvement, because it was in English. 

"Look," Sam breathed in deep, "Wax can disconnect from the vessel it's poured into, especially if it cooled rapidly. It doesn't necessarily adhere to metal perfectly. I want to make sure the plug in your arm's still secure. Just let me see, okay?"

He didn't answer her at all this time.

Manipulating the towel edge with one hand, Sam pushed the other thumb up like a wedge under his armpit. He grunted and squeaked as she pinched at him; she was trying to get that arm. He'd started curving away from her as far as the towel would allow... That was fine; he didn't have to look; he could keep his makeshift towel hood. Sam gently _squeeeeeezed_ his arm up out of the wrap and tipped the stump up to see it better.

Mn. There was even a thin coating of wax over the _outside_ of the arm, and the fact that none of it had lifted away or broken off reassured her. By all appearances, this was still a watertight seal. Though, in retrospect, Sam wasn't sure she'd made the best decision by plugging the injury with such a temporary material. She'd been in a panic at the time, and Starscream had been spurting frightening amounts of blue.

"It’s okay." She released it, and then quickly nudged it back under the towel and got him tucked back into the wrap. Her fingers hurt. One was blistered; the other was bleeding. " _You're_ okay."

A shaky _laugh_ rippled under her fingers, and Sam bristled slightly at the sound of it. He took in a deep, raspy breath and spat, _"Nothing_ about this is 'okay,' you _platitude-spouting_ imbecile."

Sam fell quiet. He didn't say anything else, and she could feel him _trembling._ She slumped against her cabinets. 

"Yeah," she finally admitted. "You're right. Everything about this sucks. This is _horrible._ First off: Everything hurts. Nothing makes sense. Science is getting fucking upended by magic toy cupboards. Humans are _gigantic_. Every single last remaining thing about this situation sucks except the 'not being dead' bit. Other than that delightful constant, ha ha, the only thing today has going for it is the complete absence of those _infuriating Autobots_."

The inarticulate whimper against her body was the only answer she got. She was blatantly pandering to him and any Starscream with any scrap of sense or dignity left wouldn't have eaten it up like this. There they were: past the dignity stage, her and her burrito both. 

"But you're going to survive," she was sure. "You're going to figure this out, and then everyone responsible is going to wish they were never born. Not exactly now. Later. When the world stops spinning. But you _are_ , and then they're going to regret _ever_ underestimating you, because you - are - _Starscream,_ and you are _better_ than them."

A brittle metal shape slowly leaned into that like a lifeline. All resistance bled out of his body. And that was good, because he'd been swooning just a minute ago, and then she'd _chased_ him.

"So for now, you're okay," Sam assured, though forced slowly to her feet by a bleeding thumb and a rising blister. "You're not bleeding, and you're not in danger, and you're safe—from everything except being beaten to death with a fluffy bath towel for attempted arson, I guess. You're _safe._ Everything sucks, _but you're safe_ _."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slap!


	5. Soapy Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay stupid birb, behave for poor Sam. She's doing her best.

A slow survey of the garage had Samantha gradually feeling the strain of a day full of manual labor. Starscream didn't break the quiet that had settled over them.

Her shelves sported a blackened pit where a (thankfully very small) missile had impacted. The storm didn't look to be letting up, and the side door clattered and slammed nosily against its frame as rain wove in and out of the threshold. She'd been working since about six in the morning, from lifting boxes and directing movers to wholesale destruction of a hutch. 

And that was all before meeting Mr. Personality. Her hands and wrists were throbbing with a battery of cuts and burns.

Oh. Hey, where had Starscream's missing arm gone? Aha: She found it on the garage floor not far from where he'd first fallen. She bent over and pinched up the severed limb, tucking it temporarily against the towel burrito under her ring finger. It was a little morbid, but assuming robot limbs didn't go necrotic the way human ones did, maybe they could use it to fix him. Best not to lose it.

The door was still clattering in the wind. Sam went to pull it firmly shut, and turned her shoulder into the wind and rain to shield her passenger. Nhh, cold. Wet. She doubled back and blew the garage candle out. Then trudged her way into the house. Without tripping. In the dark. 

"We're getting inside," she figured she ought to explain. "It's late and the garage isn't insulated."

Not that the kitchen was much more habitable. A little warmer, yeah, but she'd been working in it all day and there were power tools strewn everywhere. She looked around at the squares of discolored wallpaper that demarcated where her kitchen cabinets used to hang. The sink sat disassembled and ready for disposal. The laminate counter tops were pried off and laid off to the left. She stared at it all for awhile trying to decide what she _wanted_ of it. Then she remembered the moving boxes, and shuffled over there to avoid stubbing her toes in the dim lighting. She wanted a cup, or something like a cup.

Her passenger stayed silent. He was still either trembling or shivering.

Sam eventually made it out of the kitchen. Cup in hand, she headed into the ugly linoleum bathroom, pumped the soap a few times, and ran some warm water. She knelt and scrabbled around in the bathroom supplies, tossing away additional towels. Midway through, she tucked her burrito firmly against her shoulder so she could get her hands on the Band-Aids. She grimaced when Starscream made a miserable little noise at the disturbance. 

And then he started crying. 

Not loud crying, or ugly crying, or _keening like his soul was being eaten._

Small crying. _Little_ crying. Breathy, sobby noises that squeaked off at the end. Choked sounds and huffs and whimpers. 

Sam let hydrogen peroxide drip all over the place. She stripped the bandages with her teeth and got them around her fingers. The memory of holding out his arm stump for inspection floated back to her, along with a memory of dark, black streaks all over his plating. She clawed out the plastic box of Q-tips from the bathroom moving boxes. Then she got up off her knees, and blew out yet another candle. She trudged into her bedroom, and to her naked mattress on the floor. She threw down the Q-tips, sank to a seat, leaned against the ugly yellowed wall paper, and settled down her cup of warm water.

Okay. _Okay._

Sam selected a Q-tip, dipped it into the warm, soapy water, and stirred. Then she peeked down at her crying burrito, situated him (to several tiny, creaky gasps), and then carefully and gently targeted the Q-tip into the folds of the towel. 

At first she rubbed the cotton tip against the top of his head, but he rapidly twisted his face left and right in an effort to get away from it. She let the tip run down his back between his wings and got a more neutral response, She rubbed it around in there with no real goal, then pulled it free. It was black, black as charcoal. She turned the q-tip over, dipped the other side, and pushed it carefully down into the layers of towels.

"Shhh," she whispered low and gentle, q-tip rubbing slow, patient circles to soften grime and soak it up. "You're okay... shhh..."

Was 'shh' actually a comforting noise? Humans apparently liked reassuring hisses of white noise; cats, snakes, and birds definitely didn't. What was the deal going to be with Cybertronians? Given how much white noise the average engine made, she figured it was worth a shot.

"Shhh..."

The minutes ticked past. Little sobs trickled off and depleted themselves. He wasn't moving, and she didn't know if that meant she could _trust_ him, exactly, but she was having a really rough time seeing much of him at this angle. After a bit of thought, she closed a hand slowly around him, and transferred him from her chest down to her lap. She kept one hand on top of him for control, and pulled at the fabric edges and wormed her fingers under them to stop constricting him so tightly.

Almost _immediately,_ Starscream threw himself into contortions and managed to get his hand up and out of the wrap. She pinched the towels to trap his elbow, and they had a brief tug of war over whether it was a good idea for him to have _options_ right now. Pinpricks dug into the pant leg of her jeans but failed to sink any deeper. Sam doggedly picked up another Q-tip and directed the tip into his shoulder guard and the forward-facing panels of his wing.

The tug of war lapsed into an uneasy truce. She stopped pinching the towel closed. He didn't immediately lurch forward. 

The Q-tips started building up into a tidy stack. She probably could have submerged him in water, vigorously, scoured him with the rough side of a cleaning sponge, and gotten all this work done and more. Cleaning him was more the _excuse,_ though, not the _objective._

Red optics faded drowsily in and out. Tiny claws, previously latched into her clothing, lost their tension. Wings flattened limply under the towel. Miniaturized facial features went slack. Sam finished her last Q-tip for the night, set it aside, and stared.

An eight inch tall Starscream was asleep on her leg, partially unwrapped from a yellow towel, cheek flat against her pant leg.

Sam frowned, and lifted her thumb and fingers a little, and stared at something she'd taken for granted during all that thrashing. The little robot _breathed._ In and out, slowly, in a level rhythm. For something that could allegedly operate in the vacuum of space, this felt surprising. Unless he only exhaled exhaust fumes, and didn't inhale atmospheric gases for combustion? Or maybe, he didn't _breathe_ so much as he thermoregulated? Computers had to push air through by fan.

But his little body did lift and fall by hairsbreadths. Surely that was good enough to be called breathing.

Her thumb moved as slowly and gently as she knew how to move it, following a shoulder, following a wing, feeling the delicate smallness of him.

Hoh boy...

...Two things were absolutely true.

One: Starscream was an occasionally tragic but fundamentally flawed narcissistic sociopath with few to no redeeming qualities.

Two: She was now eternally ruined for children and pets. There had never been another creature, be it human or canine, which she had ever loved as immediately or intensely as she presently loved this tiny scrap of metal who'd cried himself to sleep.

It was intense, it was irrational, and it wasn't founded in anything that could remotely qualify as _actual love,_ and yet she could feel it in her every nerve, her every breath, and in every second that ticked by. It must have been an overblown and misplaced instinct to nurture something, but _adult men_ couldn't be saved from themselves, and trying to mother one was a recipe for lifelong psychiatric woes. The fact that this one was only the size of a fledgling songbird, notwithstanding. She was going to need to watch out for that urge and stay on top of that shit...

...Though if he disappeared by morning, and she didn't have a single picture, she was going to regret her dead phone battery until the day - she - died.

"I know you're faking until I fall asleep so that you can try and escape," Sam whispered, "that's fine. Just make sure you get some kind of rest. Tomorrow we can try and figure out how to get you back where you belong."

No response. That had been a test. Starscream would have probably thrown a fit at being 'caught' faking. Sam allowed herself to believe he was really asleep. 

"You're beautiful," she added. Wasn't the best word, and she probably meant 'precious' more than beautiful, but Starscream would have found 'beautiful' more consistent with his brand (in the unlikely even he really was faking) and, regardless, it let her get a little of the pressure off her chest. Yeah.

Satisfied for now, Sam looked around the house for anything else she needed to do. That was when she noticed how far away her bedroom candle is. Burning right there in the middle of her fire hazard of a house. After she'd just warned Starscream away from attempted arson.

...Fuck it. Sam wasn’t going to _move_. Starscream needed her leg. Sam couldn't walk on it with it _otherwise occupied_. Couldn't pick him back up and jostle him awake and send him back into panicked, soul-sick keening. Maybe Starscreams weren't generally salvageable, but she could at least avoid making this one any _worse._

Sam was just going to have to stay where she was. Fall asleep where she was. And pray the candle was far enough from the wall, or if not, that the fire alarms worked or, _if not,_ well, she'd just have to shrug her shoulders and remember to thank God she'd made it long enough to see this, because it was so real after a life time of being not-real that it almost _hurt._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think they may have found a way to communicate...!


	6. Rest Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I present to you two videos for your analysis:  
> 1\. The many strange sounds of Starscream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxaNjvCkin8  
> 2\. The rescue and burittoing of Captain Outrageous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF1i888yPR0  
> Your task is to find the differences between them...

This. Had been. A _terrible._ Idea. 

An entire day of physical exertion followed by sleeping sitting against a wall had resulted in a body filled with angry bones and angrier muscles. Before she had any idea where she was or what she was doing there, PresentSam rued whatever terrible decisions PastSam had made to land her in this position. Yet as the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling and ugly yellow wallpaper settled in, she recalled that she was no longer in her apartment—no longer _had_ an apartment, in fact. 

Groggy and uncomfortable, she pushed herself up on an elbow. The mattress was naked of sheets, she still had all her clothes on, and instead of pulling a blanket over herself or grabbing a pillow, PastSam had apparently bunched up a rolled up comforter on each side of her thighs like barricades. Why had that possibly seemed like a sensible thing to do?

And why did the whole room smell like French Vanilla?

A white towel (not yellow, that had apparently been a trick of the candle light) peeked out between her thighs, and Sam's heart skipped a beat. She reached down to the fabric. Her forefinger found the curve of a very, very small little head. She could feel air moving against her thumb. 

Sam had expected him to wake up first. That was not the case. Maybe that made sense. He'd just lost an _arm,_ that sounded like something a doctor might prescribe bedrest for. Sam floundered as quietly as she could against the wall, trying to get to a seat. What time was it? Was the power back on? Sun was filtering bleak and overcast through the windows. Her candle was still very much alive and had maybe burned a third of the way down the jar. That explained the scent. 

"Starscream?" she asked, and didn't get a response. 

Sam rubbed her face and then craned over slowly and tried to pick out the edges of his loosened buritto to get the cloth to behave like a small stretcher or hammock. She pulled corners slowly taut as she lifted, and moved slowly to ensure she'd pinched up all the right edges to prevent him from sliding out. As carefully and as gently as she could manage (given all the kinks in her arms and legs), Sam puuuuullled the Screamurrito from her thigh onto her comforters. 

Had he woken up? No. Man, he had to be out pretty hard not to notice somebody moving him. Sam's movements might have been gentle _to Sam,_ but at eight inches tall she had to have jostled him at least a little. Unless he'd woken up and was faking?

Sam worked her way out of the (painful) position she'd been sleeping in, and crawled herself around to have a look at him. His burrito had loosened up into less of a strait jacket and more of a sleeping bag. "Starscream?" she asked again.

This time, one red optic opened up and flickered to life. Sam held her breath, because the lighting in here might still have been bad, but it was still _better._ She could make out the details of his face, like the height of his cheek(bones?) and the shape of thin vents framing the sides of his jawline. He was so much more infinitely nuanced than the Transformers Prime animation team had led her to expect—but then, they hadn't been going for a hyperrealistic art style to begin with. All of the humans had been as rounded as Pixar characters.

"Let me guess," Sam supposed: " 'Shut up and let me sleep?' "

A red eye inspected her a moment longer before squeezing closed again. Starscream turned his face away from her. _Begone, human; your continued presence offends me._

Well, alright then.

She'd...

just....

...do _what_ , exactly?

Should she go back to her daily routine? Eat breakfast and get to work? That wasn't a _terrible_ idea. She had a limited amount of time budgeted to get her house in order before her clients would be calling off the hook to ask about her latest assignments. She could work on the house or she could work on her job; if she ignored both she was going to regret it when the workload swept her off her feet in a few weeks.

But was she really going to leave the most miraculous thing in the world alone in here, unsupervised? To go take care of mundane normal life stuff? Yeah, apparently so. Unless she wanted to strap him to her body somehow, and she had a feeling Starscream might actually wake up and throw a fit if she tried. He wasn't acting like escape was a high priority. And hovering around him wasn't going to make him _sleep any faster._

"...I'll check on you in a few hours," she eventually promised. "I've got to do boring everyday human stuff."

No home improvement this morning, though, or at least not the loud tasks. Sam was sore, an injured person was trying to sleep, and today would pass easier on both of them without the hum of power tools or the thudding of hammers.

Alright then: Sam went to pick up her French Vanilla candle and blow it out. She got up and headed out of the bedroom, and almost immediately heard the hum of a functional mini fridge compressor. The power was back! She turned on the kitchen light, got her phone hooked up to a charger, checked the 'fridge for milk, smelled it, and then dug out bowls and spoons and cereal boxes to make herself a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds. The sad excuse for a dining room (or tea room?) had a creaky old table and creakier chairs, and Sam sat at one to eat and rake her mind for what she ought to be _doing_ today...

There was a real, live, sentient transformer in her house.

Nope! Nope nope nope nope. Goals, Sam. Starscream was sleeping, and Sam needed to keep her life running, so that a miniature giant robot could recuperate safely. Work first, then magic. Work. WooOOOoooOOoooorrRk.

Sam was drawing blanks. 

As she finished her cereal, she located her laptop, popped it open, and tabbed through her latest work emails and project boards on Trello. Due dates and deadlines populated her calendars. She had an unopened folder of fresh orders and correspondence which her system had responded to with canned replies: 'Sorry for the inconvenience, Ms. Patterson is out of the office until...' 

_Pfft,_ 'office.' That was the 'normal,' professional way of phrasing things. Instead of, 'I had a sudden renting emergency and was prematurely (or 'finally' depending on your perspective of time) forced into the next phase of my life: Home Ownership.' Which apparently came with a magic cupboard. _And now there is a sentient robot in my—_

Focus! Focus. Focus. FoooOOOoooocus. If she could just force her brain to process words, she could make a dent in this bin of jobs and push the home improvement until... until evening, at least. 

* * *

Sam checked in on Starscream once during the morning and again shortly before lunch.

At some point he'd pulled the towel over his head and turned into more of a bun than a burrito. She tiptoed close and called his name. When he didn't answer, she wrestled a blanket out flat and gently draped a corner over him. She wasn't sure if he disliked the _light_ or if he was _cold._ The bedroom had been one of the few unfurnished rooms in the house on purchase, but it did have rickety old blinds which she gently twisted closed. There, nice and dark.

Sam had almost no food inside the house and needed to step out for provisions. As much as she didn't want to leave him alone in the house, he wasn't a helpless infant who might smother himself against the inside of a crib. If he had his wits about him, he'd at least deduce he needed to remain close to the source of the miracle: The cupboard. 

Of course, she supposed he could use the minutes she was gone try and contrive a trap to murder her with. But that explanation didn't jive with the sight of the injured jet who'd decided to skip greeting the morning altogether. 

As she dropped into her old Toyota and backed up carefully into the street, Sam reigned in on the urge to race at sixty miles an hour. The streets here were twenty-five—thirty-five at max. She puttered down the lane, across the parkway, and out onto the main street. She turned towards the grocers. Then she gunned it diagonally across the parking lot because _screw - you - rules I'm in a hurry._

* * *

Armed with trays of sushi, supplies for sandwiches, more cereal, extra tooth brushes, and a whole host of cleaning supplies, Sam leaped out of her car, threw open the trunk, grabbed the groceries, and slammed the trunk back down with a force it didn't really deserve.

She managed to pick out her house (She owned a house!) hurried up to her door, nearly lost half a bag of groceries as she fumbled for her keys, briefly eyeballed the threshold for knives, and then shimmied in and deposited all of her purchases. The house was eerily quiet for an already-inhabited space. She peeked in the bedroom and under the blanket corner, aaannnd....?

Still where she'd left him.

Still asleep.

As she lovingly tucked the blanket edge back down into place, Sam was almost _ever so slightly_ disappointed.

But not really. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Go away, Mom, can't you see I'm busy, I'm not a trained seal, gosh! >:'( >:'( >:'(


	7. Blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My foreshadowing last chapter must have been great because almost everyone caught what's going to happen next.

It wasn't until the sun was leaving the sky that it finally dawned on Sam that Starscream might not be okay. 

Sure, staying in bed all day was a time-honored way of coping with unfortunate realities, that was true. It was also a symptom of acute depression. Hell, a 'failure to regain consciousness' might be indicative of a medical complication. Starscream had just lost an entire limb. The only reason she knew he wasn't presently bleeding was because no florescent blue spots had shown up on the towel. She needed to go check on him a little more thoroughly this time.

Before she went back into the bedroom to assess the situation, Sam prepared: She pigged out on sushi. There! Now at least _one_ of them wouldn't be cranky. 

Refueling accomplished, Sam headed back into the bedroom, flipped on the light, got down on her hands and knees beside his blankets, and gently lifted the corner.

"Starscream?" she asked. 

No reaction. 

She peeled the blanket away, enough to expose his face and the side of his intact arm. She rested an elbow on the mattress behind him, to steady her hand, and then carefully pet over his back. 

"Starscream?"

She pet him a little more firmly, and then transitioned to ruffling the towel in an effort to rouse him. 

"Hey. Hey, Starscream?"

He breathed in deep and his optics opened and flickered slowly to life. The color seemed dimmer than usual, although that could have been the fault of the bright overhead lighting. He blinked slowly, squinted, and seemed a little disoriented.

"H-hey," she couldn't keep the chuckle out of her voice. "You slept the day away. Are you okay?"

Starscream stared at her a moment, but then started blinking heavily again like he was nodding off.

"Hey-! Starscream?" she tried to rouse him again. He twitched slightly, and his face crinkled up with concentration; but a second later all expression slipped away, and his eyes shut, and he passed out again.

Well.

Shit.

 _Shit_ that didn't seem good. 

Sam bristled, staring down at her almost unresponsive visitor. She swallowed past the urge to panic. She picked up the edge of his towel, and teased it gently back from his tiny body. He was still crusted in whatever black scorch marks she'd been wiping off with q-tips the night before. And as she leaned close for a better look at his metal, she saw he was crisscrossed with tiny scratches and dents. 

_Think, Sam._

There were two ways of looking at this problem. The first was to assume _it could be anything_ , and that therefore the problem was entirely beyond her ability to solve; thus she needed to take some form of drastic action so someone else could solve it for her. The second was to assume that whatever was wrong, she could fix it. She just had to unclog her brain and let the most likely answer fall out. 

_He's probably tired from blood loss._

What if Sam googled something simple? 'What does a person need to recover from blood loss?' People _gave_ blood frequently enough that there was probably some information about it out there. She imagined the solution was somewhere in the 'drink plenty of fluids' category of holistic remem—

_He hasn't eaten._

Samantha's three meals and her own warning about Earth having _zero energon_ came back to slap her in the face.

_He. Hasn't. Eaten._

She racked her brain for solutions and then spun around and attacked several of the boxes in her bedroom. Some of her toys had shipped with a _pink_ energon cube, an accessory the toy could be made to hold or pose with; but energon in Transformers Prime was _blue,_ and Sam couldn't be expected to guess whether one could be substituted for the other.

What she _did_ have, wholly by coincidence, was an "Energon Rubik's Cube," an utterly shameless rebranding slapped onto some third party, blue translucent plastic. It had been one of those cheap 'I saw this and thought of you!' gifts she'd gotten from a well-meaning aunt. Sam found it by digging around in the bottom corners of her boxes. There!

Rubik's cubes _seemed,_ on first glance, a lot like a stack of twenty-seven blue cubes, three by three by three. Of course, it _wasn't_ a stack of twenty-seven cubes. See-through plastic worked to expose the internal mechanisms: The exterior 'cube-ness' was a sort of facade, and the pieces rotated about their siblings on an interwoven sphere of parts.

But technically speaking it _had_ been sold with 'Energon' written in big bold letters on its package. And Starscream's figurine hadn't been a perfect anatomical model of a robot; so why would her energon need to be perfect, either? 

_God please let this work._

Sam left the bedroom and barged through the house and it’s garage door. She approached the still very sad-looking cupboard, prayed it’s magic hadn't leaked out or dispersed, and then knelt down to nestle Energon cube in its center. She looked away. She closed her eyes. She _covered_ her eyes. She counted to five.

And when she looked back, a stack of twenty-seven glowing blue cubes twinkled smugly up at her.

Sam reached carefully down to pick up a corner cube from the top. It felt a little reluctant to budge, like the stickiness of a weak magnet. She wasn't sure how they opened, didn't want them to spill, and wasn't sure how they'd respond to a sharp impact if they fell. She got her arm around the stack, and tipped it experimentally into her palm. The cubes stayed together. Nothing spilled.

Sam plucked up the energon and hurried back out of the garage. She elbowed open doors so the cubes stayed protected in the cup of her hands and didn't experience any shocks. She grabbed a plate that was poking its nose out of a kitchen moving box—that'd serve as a nice flat surface for holding the cubes. 

In the bedroom, she pinned the stack down on the plate, extracted a single corner cube, and then craned back over her sleeping guest. Once more, she resorted to rubbing and patting him.

"Starscream," she called gently. "Starscream, please wake up."

He was so limp that she started to assume the worst, and began cobbling together a mental plan for what to do next. Then his eyes flashed open so fast it became clear he'd been trying to ignore her, and that he was at least energetic enough to be pissed at her. A good sign!

Sam showed him the energon cube.

Red eyes flew open wide, expression dropped off his face, and the cables along his neck bobbed in what could only be compared to an instant salivation response. He reached clumsily up, hand weaving slightly. "W-where did you get _that?"_ he rasped.

"Don't worry about that," Sam admonished, bringing the cube close to him. "Eat first, questions later."

He got a weak grip on it. He shifted his fingers and got a _better_ grip on it. Even then, she kept the edge of her finger under the rear corner and helped him guide it shakily down to his face. She tried to help him sit up so gravity wouldn't be fighting his efforts to eat.

Starscream cradled the volume half against his shoulder, popped off what looked like a rubber corner guard you'd put on furniture, and then put his mouth over the exposed corner and carefully tilted the cube. That first, long gulp of energon was slow and sensuous... But then he lowered the cube, and smacked his lips together.

"Something wrong with it?" she worried.

He gave a little jerk of his chin like he was telling her to settle down and wait a moment. She obliged. And soon enough she picked up on the low, soft whir of his engines spinning. Starscream eyed the energon cube. The corner of a nearly white tongue slid between his lips. Mmm-mmm, she must have gotten the right brand of blue.

Yup: As if a switch flipped, Starscream tipped up the cube and started guzzling it. He was positively _greedy_ about it: Noisy, loud, slightly sloppy; optics were closed to slits; a thin trickle of neon teal pooled at the corner of his lips and eventually dripped down his chin. He didn't have to pause between swallows to breathe; his vents handled that task independently.

Sam gradually relaxed. "I don't know if Cybertronians get sick if they eat too much on an empty stomach," she broached, "but —"

" '—fuel tank' ," he interrupted, and then tipped the cube back for another long chug.

"Pardon?"

He didn't interrupt his drink to explain himself, but it did seem like he ought to know best.

Sam settled in. She was already dutifully standing in for his missing elbow in keeping him propped up. Her free hand plucked at the towel, teasing him free by a couple inches of fabric at a time. Starscream twitched a bit, but otherwise cooperated by lifting a leg a little here, a wing a little there. Sam inspected the towel for any sneakily small blue smudges of blood and, finding none, she tossed the excess fabric aside. 

The overhead ceiling light helped tell a story: Starscream was dirty and he was scraped. His metal was almost matte it had so many imperfections in it. Whatever he'd been through lately, breaking down into needy, helpless tears the night before hadn't been an accident of her imagination. She had to resist the urge to keep _touching_ him. There was a big weld line on one of his thighs.

When Starscream had finally glutted himself, he lowered the cube and sucked in a deep breath. He let it out in a high, falling sigh. Such a sigh could only mean one thing: _I feel fat, and it is good._

"You found me energon," he hummed, eyes still closed. For a moment he looked so incredibly pleased with the universe that he actually smiled a bit. It might have been a giddy, pre-mania smile. Doubtful. It looked soft-edged and genuine. It was most likely directed at the sensation of fullness more than at any person.

All of this served to suggest he'd been hungry for much longer than a day. In retrospect, she ought to have considered it sooner. Half a season of Transformers Prime had involved Prime!Starscream alone, injured, and/or foraging for scraps. He'd even monologued to himself about it. (More than once? _More than once._ )

"We got lucky on that count," Sam shook her head back into the present. "The cupboard decided to accept a pretty lame puzzle cube as a valid order for energon. Not sure how it can tell the difference between one franchise's random blue squares and another's, but I'm not complaining. Take a look.

His eyes opened with a hungry gleam as she showed off a dish full of twenty-six additional energon cubes. He even leaned towards them, like he wanted to get his hand ~~s~~ all over them to assess their reality. Sam obliged him and got the plate and its cubes right up in front of him. He situated his current cube carefully onto the blankets beside him, and then reached out to appraise and stroke the others...

"What exactly do you want in exchange...?" he slowly asked her.

"What do I-?" The question seemed silly at first, like a cliche mark of an untrusting evildoer who'd never known a moment's kindness. Yet Starscream didn't sound suspicious so much as _ready to negotiate,_ like a contractor who'd heard you were good at fabricating broken tractor parts and was ready to hear what kind of goods or services you might need in exchange. So she thought about it for a bit, because maybe it would make him more comfortable if she could come up with a good answer. 

Fuel scarcities were a very real danger in his home dimension. His species was mid-war and couldn't necessarily afford to help random strangers out of the goodness of their hearts. Starscream also _wasn't_ a random stranger. He had been a high-ranking Decepticon with a few _infamous_ personality quirks; when people dared to offer him something, it was only ever with the expectation of payment. 

"I don't really need anything," she specified. "My life's not perfectly stable but it’s good enough, so no emergency problems to solve, and I don't think there's much a tiny not-fictional person could do for me regardless." She moved the plate off to the side but not out of his range of vision. "So I'll settle for a truce."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, no more shrieky slicey flamey stuff. In return I'll feed you. Same basic deal I give normal pet cats, Coo?


	8. Bath

"A 'truce?' " 

"Yeah," Sam made sure he could stay seated, carefully extracted her fingers from his side, and then crossed her arms on the mattress to keep talking at more or less eye-level with him. "We don't injure each other. You can go... basically anywhere as long as you stay safe. I have to get some work done. And then after you've recuperated, we'll try and work out how to fix the cupboard so it works both ways again. Is that fair?"

" 'Fair?' " Starscream was suspicious now. "It sounds like you are offering to help me for _no reason_."

"Sort of," she agreed. "You caught me in the middle of moving into a new house. I have to strip the walls, dig up the carpet, clean everything, stain everything, polish everything. It's a big job but it's not exactly coordinating a war. If I fall behind my life’s going to be hell until Christmas. So: You can live here and I'll help get you safely back home as long as you aren't actively sabotaging me."

His nose wrinkled and he looked displeased. His face was _darker_ than Transformers Prime had depicted it, more consistent with G1 or IDWStarscream in being an earthy, dull ebony. "You have stumbled into _actual magic_ ," he demanded of her, "and yet you are bothering with things as banal as _construction labor?_ I see you are not an especially ambitious thinker."

Sam agreed. "Well, we can't all be you, Starscream."

His wings fluffed up. Not with _actual fluff_ in the way of feathers; but they popped up from their limp tuck against his back and several panels open or extended, like the brake panels for generating negative lift while landing. Not an instant later, he shuddered, and quickly looked around himself like he was missing his burrito.

Sam perked up. "Are you cold?" she asked.

He grimaced, tucked his wings back down, and plucked at the towel. "Basking on a full tank might be advisable..."

" 'Basking?' Hmm. Well the sun's already down and the sky was overcast to begin with," Sam mused. "Are you waterproof?"

"What? What does that have to do with anything!?"

"I could heat up some water and you could have yourself a hot bath," Sam considered. "Maybe with oil soap or something in it? I'm not up to date on preferred robot hygiene products but if you happen to know the kind of solvent you'd _prefer_ we might be able to track it down using chemical formulas on the internet."

Starscream made a couple transitional noises from 'indignant' to 'thinking' to 'a bath? really?' He looked her up and down, and shuttered his eyes, and then turned his head away and flicked his claws. "That..." he tried to sound disdainful but ended up coming across as _pitifully_ interested in the offer, "might do. The water and... whatever 'soap' it was that you mentioned."

"Sure. You mind coming with me so I don't get the water temperature wrong?"

He pretending to clean out grit from under his claws. "I suppose that would entail picking me up."

"It would, yeah. Unless you can fly?"

Starscream glowered in her direction. 'Don't bring up flight again,' said his posture. "I _suppose_ I will stoop to being carried," said his voice. He pointed a claw at her. "But know that if you _ever_ try to restrict my motions again—!"

"I understand. But in return, please avoid all blenders, stoves, ovens, microwaves, toasters, power tools, large hammers, gardening and lawn care supplies, the toilet, vacuum cleaners, drains, garbage disposals, wall outlets, precariously balanced towers of box—you know what, _don't die horribly_ , how about I just leave it at that?"

Starscream had excellent facial expressions; he could have had a whole conversation with them and never said a word. This expression said he was conflicted, baffled, and mildly intimidated by just how dangerous human houses might be.

"See, this is why I worry about you when you start hiding under appliances made for people my size," she teased. "I can't fit in a microwave, much less accidentally murder myself with one. I'm pretty sure you can easily think of entirely benign Cybertronian things that'd kill a human. Top of the list would be 'falling off a table.'"

"Hnh. I'm far more durable than you water bags, but... Point taken."

"You want to bring the towel?"

He eyed it without answering, like it was both needed and offensive.

She got off her elbows and scootched her knees back under her center of gravity. "I'll scoop my hands under you," she offered, "so at least you don't have to get up."

"Yes, by all means, _serve me,_ " he muttered to offset the irritability of having all these fingers in his personal space. 

Sam chuckled as she stood, hands cupped, towel still captive. "Yes, Lord Starscream." 

Floof! Up went those wings again. Either Starscream wasn't anywhere near as sneaky as he thought he was, or else millions of years of war had turned everyone into tactless grouches, incapable of complimenting anyone even if only unto an end. Or, alternatively, the last few months had been _particularly shitty._

Sam needed not to grin, because that would be to give up the game; and she wanted at least one more floof out of him before he inevitably caught on to her and started scowling contemptuously instead.

* * *

The lack of kitchen was really fighting Sam right now.

She had a water source in the bathroom, a microwave on the floor, and her only flat equivalent of a counter top was in the dining room. And while she'd never intended on putting Starscream in the actual bathtub—he needed a hot soak, not a trip around an Olympic-sized swimming pool—he'd also turned his nose up to best efforts of the house water heater, so that ruled out drawing a bath in the sink. 

She placed Starscream temporarily on the dining room table, right on top of her closed laptop, because the graphics card and processors were still hot. The towel she bunched quickly up around him for a bit of insulation, but left it up to him whether he'd actually pull any of it over himself.

"Let me fetch some stuff."

It only took her about three minutes to find everything she needed and another two minutes to microwave the water, but as she came back to Starscream she found him leaned over and scrutinizing the various ports on the size of her laptop. She was so delighted to see him up to no good that it temporarily overwhelmed her concern for her livelihood.

Oh boy. This might have been a tactical blunder.

"Looking for something?" She did not yet feel appropriately nervous, and so her voice stayed upbeat. She placed down a pitcher of hot water and a twenty-five ounce coffee cup with saucer, because her cereal bowls were hiding somewhere and she couldn't find the Tupperware. 

"What am I seated upon?" he demanded.

"Work computer," she answered, depositing a grocery bag full of cleaning supplies on the chair. "Let me see." She craned over and ran her finger along the laptop edge, figuring honesty would interest him less than evasiveness. "That's the audio jack, that's for a microphone, the USBs are for data transfer." 

" _Hmm_."

He'd made one syllable sound nefarious. "Uhuh. Well whatever you plan on doing with that knowledge, please keep in mind _I_ need to eat if we're to buy enough plastic energon toys so that _you_ can continue to eat."

"Your threat is noted," he answered and dismissed simultaneously, which wasn't reassuring at all.

Samantha muttered 'oh boy' under her breath and focused instead on holding up her wide-brimmed cup beside him so she could gauge whether it would be big enough. Oh yeah. Tight fit, yeah, but it was the best she could find right now; the cup was as big as most bowls, and this was definitely going to work. 

She was about to put Starscream in a giant _teacup_.

Maybe she deserved his worst.

* * *

Steaming water streamed out of the pitcher.

Sam wasn't sure how far down from boiling he wanted it, but at least the sound caught his attention and brought his head up. She filled the cup halfway, unscrewed a bottle of Murphy's oil soap she'd found in the garage, sniffed it, and then poured couple dollups in and stirred with her teaspoon.

It was technically more of a wood cleaner than a metal cleaner, but it couldn't _hurt_ him, or, at least, she didn't imagine it would. You cleaned metal with soap and you polished it with oil, so this couldn't be any worse than—

"—what is that _odor?"_ Starscream sounded offended. Sam had neglected to consider that mechanical persons might not be attracted to the antiseptic smell of pine. Of course he wouldn't be. It probably smelled organic. She looked up and was surprised to see him trying to stand.

"Oil soap," she paused, uncertain if he intended to come over and supervise the teacup himself. "If you want me to switch it out for regular dish detergent, I can." She just wasn't sure what exactly robots found to be _moisturizing,_ or even if there was a direct analog, and had hoped oil might feel better on so many tiny little dings and scratches.

Starscream stood: Tall, waspishly proportioned, and balancing on absolutely dainty feet. It was almost easy to forget he was presently _maimed,_ or that he'd been passing out on her less than fifteen minutes ago. He had something of a self-confident _strut,_ a way of rolling his hips, which was probably necessary if he wanted to make full use of his criminally long legs. Those heels struts were no joke.

Sam leaned back on her heels and waited, folding her hands.

Starscream started his inspection at the oil soap bottle, walking around it to squint at the writing on the back. He glanced at the other cleansers she'd brought, and then went and put his hand into nearly boiling water. She took a breath to warn him that it was hot, but, to her surprise, he didn't seem to find it uncomfortable. Apparently Starscream liked baths at the temperature most people liked their coffee. He raised his hand out of the water and rubbed his thumb against his forefingers. He made a disdainful grimace, looked away, waved a wrist, and made no specific demands of her.

Sam took that as her all clear to continue and lifted the pitcher again. She poured. The soap foamed. She had to guess when it was reasonably full because the foam bloomed up over the lip. He looked back and tried to feign disinterest. She set the pitcher aside, and gestured with a hand.

_The teacup is yours, your Majesty._

He eyed it. He eyed her, but only for a second, because the cup was suddenly so interesting to him that he could barely look away from it. What was so fascinating? The sound of softly crackling bubbles? The rising steam? The tastefully oversized ceramic cup? It was impossible to get inside his tiny head and find out. 

"Something wrong?" Sam encouraged. 

He scowled at her but decided it was time to get in. He first leaned his hand against the rim for balance and then slowly swung one knee up over it at a time. Sam nearly made the mistake of grabbing him when she saw his balance falter, but she restrained herself just in time; and thankfully Starscream turned out not to need the help. She was reminded of people passing out in hot tubs, and decided she was not going to leave him alone in his cup. _Just in case._ She'd make up an excuse to stay immediately beside him. Work! Work was a brilliant excuse. 

His eyes closed and he tilted his head back with a hiss. He slid himself into the steaming water. Foam hugged him. He came to a rest with his arms draped around the curved edge of the cup, and he lifted a leg just high enough for the knee and toes to peek out above the foam. Everything about it felt like an artist on a music video set; a magical capture of ten seconds of indulgent decadence and sensation, given artistic expression. One could almost pretend it was hot chocolate and whipped cream in there instead of water.

Sam silently reached into her back pocket, extracted her iPhone, lifted it up, and snapped a picture. Thank God he wasn't paying any attention to her anymore, or she'd have needed to explain herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam in dimly lit garage: LET GO OF THE LAWNMOWER YOU MISERABLE SHRIEKY WEASEL!  
> Sam in bright lit dining room: .......................... (Snaps picture quietly like papparazzi)


	9. Crisis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to have a little fun!

Sam sat at the dining room table to wait.

Her guest was blissfully ignoring her. He kept lifting up his toes out of the foam and staring at them, and she was left to speculate why. Her present interpretation was that it had been a very long time since he'd sat in volume of liquid large enough hide his feet from him. It was either that or he was 'playing' with the foam, picking it up on his feet and setting it down again. His eyelids sat at half mast and his lips were gently parted. Suddenly he bit his lower lip, hooked both heels on the edge of the cup, and pulled his upper body under the water for a nice dunk.

He stayed down there for a bit, knees and feet the only thing to be seen, toes occasionally letting go to dip in the cup for warmth before hooking back on. At some point he decided to roll, and reached up languidly to grab the cup rim with five pointy claws. Knees temporarily disappeared from sight, and wings sprang up, covered in foam and flicking droplets out over the table. Water sloshed gently over the side of the cup, dripping in rivulets down to the saucer.

This, evidently, was not enough water coverage, because both legs reappeared, hooked their thighs over the edge of the cup, and little fingers disappeared as Starscream arched down to dunk his upper body as keep as he could get it, chest likely flush against the very bottom of the cup. Sam slowly tilted her head, kind of impressed. The bath time teacup yoga was strong with this one. She watched the tippy tips of wings stirring the foam. Then they flapped and thrashed rapidly. Sam was uncertain if this signified _drowning_ or a _bird bath_ but his legs were still curled together with the ankles crossed, so decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and she watched. 

And resurface Starscream did, both entirely on his own and in a reasonably short time frame. He gave a satisfied sigh, and rolled back into a seat against the side of his cup. There he slumped in a lazy sprawl, with as much of himself covered by the blanket of liquid heat as was possible. All energy for athletic activity had clearly been expended; Starscream was now going to lay back, close his eyes, and lounge in this cup for as long as he was able. The day was _over_ now. So Sam resumed worrying he might pass out. She still hadn't worked out if Cybertronians _needed_ oxygen, but surely his vents wouldn't appreciate any sudden intake of water.

She craned over him and the odor of Murphy's Oil Soap, and tried to figure out the most tactful way to say 'please rearrange yourself to keep your head well above the water level.' Apparently he didn't like her head blotting out the dining room light, because he opened his eyes and glared up at her before she'd made a peep. Wings flared up, claws tightened, and—

—why did Sam suddenly smell cardamom? It was subtle, under the pine, but—

"Yes, human?" Starscream growled, voice lower and most smokey than on average. "Do you _want_ something?"

—what a weird spice to smell. Heck, technically Sam only even knew what cardamom _smelled like_ because of those scented beeswax candles she'd bought last year. She'd gotten half a dozen based on herbs and spices she'd heard of but never known the smell of: Anise, cardamom, sage, frankincense—

"You know, I can think of think more relaxing situations than being loomed over by an unnaturally large bag of—"

"Arm out of the water!" she shouted in dawning horror, chair scraping out from under her as she lurched to her feet.

Starscream jumped and fell to the side, flailing slightly but raising his injured arm as instructed. The smell of aromatic spice warred with oil soap, and she pinched hold of his arm and held it up. Starscram's five little claws gleamed on the opposite hand. He was debating attacking her to get her to let go. She would deserve it, if he did. The entire exterior skin of wax around the injured arm had melted off and was likely floating around in little disks on the surface of the water. The plug itself was soft and gooey, and some of it appeared to have leaked away. The remainder had undoubtedly expanded upon being heated, and would need to cool slowly.

" _Shit_ that was close," she wheezed. "I don't think I knew the temperature wax melted at. Do-do you feel okay? Not lightheaded or whatever would be a sign of blood loss?"

"Do I _feel_ -!?" Sam expected to be berated but, when she looked down at him, Starscream had his jaw parted and seemed to be visibly biting the sides of his tongue. If Sam had to guess, maybe _Starscream_ just so happened to know the temperature wax melted at, and now he couldn't tell her off without sounding ignorant. But since when did that ever stop people from insulting one another, honestly? She'd expected Starscream to insult her for his _own_ failures. The silence left her a mite confused. 

When he planted his palm on the rim of the cup, and started pushing like he was going to stand and abandon bath time, she felt _terrible_. "Wait! Just- _I'm sorry,_ let me get you something cold to lean it on. Can- can you hold it out over the side for a second, so at least it's not immersed in scalding water?"

" 'Scalding,' " he scoffed. She grimaced and hurried out of the room. There was nothing in her freezer, and sushi trays didn't exactly hold their temperature long, but she did have a half-empty gallon of milk and so that was what she brought him. Starscream grimaced, maybe at the size of yet another object bigger than him. But he carefully rolled slowly back to a seat, and hooked his arm over the side of the cup, and braced the tip against the side of the jug. Sam sagged into her seat. 

Crisis averted.

* * *

The air still smelled faintly of spice.

Sam leaned back, groaned, and rubbed her face. Starscream felt gingerly over his stub, looking roughly as spooked as she felt negligent, and stared out into the abyss.   
  
"Let's..." She took a deep breath. "Let's go to the hardware store first thing tomorrow."  
  
Red eyes flicked up to her.   
  
"Maybe we can find something there. A better solution. Wax was only ever a stopgap."

Sam wondered how thick the wax left inside his wound really was. She wondered if she ought to go and get that cardamom candle out of the garage, light it up again, and pass his stub through it again. Surely a hardware store would have some product you could patch an injured mechanical person up with. Grout? Caulk? Did this Starscream self-identify as any kind of _scientist_ , the way other versions did? Would he be able to recognize potentially corrosive or damaging chemicals? Or was there a mechanical solution? Might a crafts store have fine enough pins or needles to 'stitch' the interior components of the wound shut?

Sam felt an anxious thrumming drive to abandon all sense of caution and responsibility towards the multiverse and instead pitch the nearest Transformers Medic toy into that cupboard. She suppressed that. _It would be irresponsible._

Did Starscream have any basic first-aid knowledge? She thought to ask, but a glance his way convinced her not to make _any sudden movements,_ much less actually speak. He looked balanced on a knife's edge between anxiety and relaxation. His brows were pinched together, his jaw was grit, and Sam became convinced that if she so much as breathed too loudly, he'd lose whatever fragile patience he had left, and then he wouldn't just _snap,_ he'd _explode._ There'd be all forms of petulant and immature developments, like a refusal to ever, ever, ever relax, _ever again_ (and definitely never in a cup). Sam swallowed down hard on all her suggestions.

The minutes slipped by. Microscopic foam bubbles continued to slowly crackle and pop, keeping the air populated in the lightest layer of white noise. Starscream's face smoothed out again. He rubbed quietly at his stump. Tension dripped out of the air, and Sam eventually dared to rustle in her bag of grocery story cleaning supplies.

Hadn't she bought a fresh pair of Kitchen Mate scissors? Yup. She tore open that cardboard package with her hands. Uh. Maybe she oughtn't flourish the scissors around, though. Probably looked intimidating, when you were only as tall as they were. She kept the plastic packages of cleaning implements mostly in her lap, then, cutting plastic when easy tear lines sucked or failed to exist altogether. While her busywork did eventually attract someone's attention, by then he sounded calm:

"What is that?" Starscream inquired disdainfully.

"Sponges," Sam wave a representative from a six-pack of yellow and green rectangles.

"And what, exactly, do you plan to do with them?"

"Heh." It was a relief to have him back at his emotional neutral zone. "I'm not going to do _anything_ with them unless you ask me nicely." Sam clipped off a corner of the sponge. "Here we go." She passed him the tiny wedge. "A you-sized sponge."

Starscream stared at it like he had never seen a sponge before. She'd seen that expression on someone's face when offering them a crab leg, once. 'How does one extract benefit from this object? What is it's function?' Starscream _did_ take the sponge wedge, perhaps unwilling to show any fear of something obviously harmless. He turned it over in his hand. Sponges: The enigma.

"In case you wanted to clean yourself," she specified, while cutting off a few curls of steel wool for the same exact reason. "It's got a rough side and a soft side. Although I'm not sure what qualifies as rough, so I grabbed a few other things to try." 

Indignation puffed him up. "Are you saying I'm _dirty?_ "

Sam blinked up at him.

Wat.

He was filthy. Surely he _felt_ filthy? Soaking was a good start, but eventually someone had to push up their sleeves and apply some elbow grease to the situation. Literally, in this case. 

Before she could even muster a reply, he began bristling with outrage—outrage which melted straight to mortification. Halfway through he actually _looked_ down at himself, and the scorch marks and chips and scrapes all over his body. His wings trembled violently. He twisted away in anger, and hunched his good shoulders a bit, as if to hide himself. In a very self-conscious way, he submerged the sponge into the water, took it back out again to examine its changed properties, and brought it up to rub little circles of grime off his chest plate.

Gone was arrogant proud Starscream commandeering oversized coffee receptacles like a supermodel. They were back to sad kitten left out in the rain Starscream.

Apparently baseline Cybertronian hygiene didn't cover manual scrubbing? Or something? What _was_ this reaction? Sam was quizzical. Sam was also ready and able to help. She looked down at her next package and stripped cardboard backing from plastic cover. She freed the softest brush—nylon from a set of nylon, brass, and iron—and then she leaned past the teacup and displayed the implement for him. 

Starscream shot little angry glares at her, like she should know better than to intrude on him when he was feeling sorry for himself, and that she ought to go away and leave him to ~~sulk~~ brood. He didn't maintain eye-contact, and muttered things in Cybertronian synthesizer noises under his breath.

Sam leaned on her elbows and examined that brush; pulling the bristles back with her thumb slowly until they flicked smoothly back into place. It was, essentially, a toothbrush. A red-handled, black-bristled, stiff toothbrush.

Red eyes stared untrustingly at her, but at least some calculations started going on behind them. He wasn't doing a great job at keeping his arm stub away from the hot water right now, but at least he hadn't dipped it again. "What!" he finally snapped at her, perhaps goaded by her smile. "Well? Speak!"

"Why am I getting the sensation you've _never,"_ she made the fatal mistake of giggling, "properly cleaned yourself before?"

 _"Excuse_ me!?" he snarled. "What an _impertinent_ assumption! _Our_ wash racks use a far superior solvent to the near-useless, rust-inducing, oxidizer coating your planet; our surfactants are in all ways better than yours; and any serious or cosmetic damage is easily repaired and buffed out by a professional!"

"Well then clearly you've got things under control," Sam said to the person who most definitely did not, given that everything he'd just listed with an amenity and/or convenience he no longer had access to. "I won't interrupt your sophisticated cleansing rituals any further; I wouldn't want you to look or feel anything other than _perfect_ by the end." She set the brush down, and scooted herself into the seat before her work computer, and lifted the lid to browse the internet and pretend to be seriously engaged in things much, much more interesting than him; none of which existed—tragically—but _he_ didn't need to know that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watch out, this is where they start knocking everything off the table and then eventually lay down right on top of the keyboard.


	10. Brushie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I get the impression Starscream went from 'getting spa treatment' to 'too young and ambitious to care' to 'laughing maniacally over corpses of his enemies soaked in gore' to 'eh, the medics fix everything serious' to 'after 4 millions of war and cold abrasive wash racks showers on the nemesis, everyone looks like shit, we just don't actually say it to our commander's faces.' 
> 
> Everyone but Knockout, that is...

The sound of metal on the cup was a bit like the sound of many small tea spoons. Water sloshed here or there over the saucer. It dripped with every lift of the miniature sponge. It was accompanied by testy mutters in an unintelligible language. Starscream didn't like how things had turned out.

Sam kept busy. She didn't glance over. Not until the sounds of bathing grew suspiciously quiet, and then she only peeked over to make sure he wasn't going to drown himself. 

She found red eyes pouting at her from across the table. 

Sam raised her brows expectantly. _Yes, your Majesty?_

He looked down at the brush, and then up at her. 

_Nuh-uh,_ Sam would not crawl back to him so easily. _I'm the big mean human who insulted your appearance after you'd done such a good job at birdbath yoga, remember? You told me off. You set a boundary. See this, this is us respecting our boundaries._

He continued to stare at her like he could compel her to action by will alone. 'I know you can read my mind,' said his malcontented silence. 'Now do what I want without making me ask, so I can pretend I don't like it.'

She shook her head sadly and went back to the internet. 

And honestly Sam _did_ expect that to be the end of it. She expected him to call 'Sour Grapes' on the whole thing, scorn her, and mutter away his displeasure; maybe call her a few insults when she finally got him back to bed. Little could she have anticipated the doggedness with which he stared her down, countenance unwavering, silently demanding her attention return to him.

And it did, inevitably. His eyes _glowed._ How could you not look at a person who was _glowing_ at you? He locked stares with her for the better half of a minute, _ensuring_ he had her complete attention. Then he slooowwwlly turned himself around in his cup, and leaned with his arms over the lip and his back facing her. His twitching wings fanned out to either side in a display: vulnerable.

 _Hnnnrrrggghhh..._ Sam exhaled silently. _Self, does this qualify as 'asking me nicely'?_

_Self? Hello? Self. Earth to Self. Stop staring and answer the question._

_...Pushover._

Pushover Sam might have been, but she still held back as long as she could. Long enough to make someone _awkward and anxious_ , if the huffy, whiny, self-pitying little sounds she heard were to be believed. (Obviously those were just tricks of her hearing, and he'd deny them vociferously were she to bring them up. Heavens forbid he should actually use _words_ and ask for some help; which was actually for the best, as he'd probably go straight from 'leave me alone, meatbag' to 'tend me, serf' and then Sam would have needed to decide between refusing out of principle or stroking his ego right up into the stratosphere.)

 _Screw it,_ Sam was done guessing and narrating Starscream's thoughts! She picked up the brush, shut her laptop, and scooted back into the seat just beside him before he could give up 'asking.'

She dipped the brush into the water. She extended it gently up between his shoulders, and settled the bristles down, and rubbed in the same, slow, careful circles she'd q-tipped the day before. Black scorch marks gently fell away from his back plates. Wings dipped and wiggled a little on either side of the brush... Slowly, trembling, they laid out flat against opposite sides of the cup; slowly, they fell still. 

Starscream never said a word. He didn't shoot her looks over his shoulder. He didn't make snide remarks. He didn't smile. He didn't _move._

She brushed meticulously circles out to the tip of the left wing, stopping every few seconds to rewet the brush. Dip, brush brush brush. Dip, brush brush brush. His brake panels extended slightly, and she brushed them, too. After finishing Wing Number One, she dragged the bristles up one edge, and down the other. Then she transitioned over to Wing Two.

When she'd finished both, she dunked her brush into the water to lever the bristles up under the wing. They lifted for her one at a time, and she brushy-brushied their undersides. Brushy-brushy near the body. Brushy-brushy near the tips. It took a little bit of time for her to get through all the blackened scorch marks like this. On an actual oven or stove-top, she'd have used more force.

True to the spirit of the long-handled implement she was wielding, Sam kept the whole cleansing 'hands-free.' That was a more important boundary she'd need to keep in check: No fingers, no grabbing, no manipulating his position; not without his go-ahead. When she wanted to get around his waist, she had to guess where that was and settle for gently brushing the sides and back, only. Same for his legs, which stayed completely submerged. She couldn't reach his chest at all.

And, no matter how cute it would have been, she did _not_ gently brush his helm and forehead crest like combing a baby's hair. She valiantly resisted! He hadn't liked strange, alien implements around his face last night when she'd been gently swabbing his plating clean with a q-tip, so that area was now off-limits until some signal demonstrated otherwise!

* * *

The foam settled, and the water grew brackish with soot. The saucer was nearly filled with spillover. The temperature grew lukewarm; still decent for a human's bath, but no longer a temperature Sam would take her coffee at.

"Starscream?" she asked. 

A wing twitched.

"You awake?" She had to get up on her knees in her chair, and lean heavily on her elbows across the table, to try and get a look at his face.

Eyelids drooped heavily over red eyes, reminding her he was still very weak and had been passed out on her bed the whole day. He looked a little disoriented, but she hoped that was owed to relaxation and not the faintness of hunger. It might be a good idea to pass him the remainder of his cube before letting him drop off. Sam exhaled a smile. She set the brush aside.

"Come on," she offered him her hand so he'd have something to lean on and wouldn't risk slipping or embarrassing himself. "Let me rinse you off."

Eyes watched her foggily for half a second. Then claws reached up and found a grip on the meat of her finger pad. A forearm draped over her finger. She pulled him slowly up to his feet like a gentlewoman, and then lifted up the water pitcher and gently poured a trickle of hot water down his back and over his wings. They flapped, flicking moisture everywhere. Water spilled over the top of the coffee cup and saucer. Alas, poor old rickety dinning room table.

Sam made sure to rinse off both wings. She settled down the pitcher and reached for that handy dandy towel they'd left behind—not for the sake of the table, of course, but to give Starscream a warm soft scoop to fall into. She briefly forgot she wasn't supposed to be grabby, and rubbed the towel edge over his legs. Then angry foot heels, a curled sneer, bared teeth, and needle-sharp finger-prickles reminded her why this was a bad idea.

Uh oh. "Can I dry you off?" she tried. It'd be faster than watching him fumble with the towel himself.

His feet pressed uncomfortably at her fingers for a moment longer before relenting. She gathered up a thick wad of towel and dabbed at his wings and body, so he didn't have to deal with feeling her fingers on him. He slumped, gradually. She walked them back to the bedroom as she worked.

"You look pooped." She was lucky he was too tired to take issue with her organic choice of words, especially because she might have been chuckling at his expense again. "Here," she stooped and pinched up his mostly spent energon cube from earlier. "Bedtime snack?"

Starscream didn't answer her but groggily took the cube and nursed on it till it was empty. He wasn't even keeping his eyes open anymore. He was ready for bed.

One-handed, she picked up and shook open one of those blankets he'd been enjoying all day, and she placed it onto the carpet beside the mattress, and she spun it into a bit of a flower so it had some volume to it. That'd have to work for a 'nest' tonight.

She waited until he'd finished his cube, and offered him a full one. He shook his head, eyes barely opening to red slivers before closing again. She leaned over and helped him slowly into his blankets, whisking away the wet towel as she did so. He curled into them with surprising readiness for someone who had never, not in any media form, been depicted owning any other sleeping surface than a large metal slab.

For a second, she stilled. She _watched._ She marveled at the smallness of him: The darkness of his 'skin,' the nicks and cuts texturing his body, the way he gleamed a bit now in the overhead lighting, and thin stripes of red paint that had previously been entirely obfuscated in soot. 

"You look good," she whispered, uncertain whether he could hear her anymore, but hoping it still made up for whatever cultural faux pas or personal slight they'd bumped into about 'dirtiness.' Wings did twitch slightly in response to her voice. Heh. He had a smudge of black on his face, _right over his nose._ She really was going to have to put him in front of a mirror and teach him the inns and outs of spongecraft. Not now though, no.

Sam pulled the corner of the blanket up over him to block out the overhead light.

She sat back on her heels.

For awhile, she just zenned out into the weird normality of the moment.

Then she yawned and looked about her bedroom. She patted herself and felt grimy clothing she'd been wearing and working in for two days.

Tonight she had at least had to find a change of clothes, the fitted sheets, and some pillows. If that meant making a bit of noise and moving cardboard boxes around, well... Starscream was probably far too deep asleep already to be disturbed by it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Go check out [rabbitzoro](https://www.deviantart.com/rabbitzoro/art/tiny-Starscream-misadventures-2-330982624) and her fantastic brushie brushie from 2012 and give her a fave.


	11. Wakey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Starscream is finally alert without adrenaline, but Sam's adrenaline might only just be kicking in.

Samantha woke up at an indeterminate hour, again to a ceiling she didn't really recognize, but also to an ugly wallpaper she was starting to wish she could throw a candle at. Maybe later, when it wasn't attached to her house anymore. Ooh, that was _right,_ she had a _house_ now. 

She wiped her face and looked blearily about for an alarm clock, only to find herself staring up into a leering shadow and shrewd red eyes. A miniature robot was seated on the cardboard box just beside her head, looming over her. He had a fresh energon cube in hand, looked alert, and was clearly plotting to kill her in her sleep. 

"Hey!" Sam couldn't be more proud. Also, this was ten thousand times more exciting than owning a house.

Brows peaked a little curiously; she was happy to see him, and he was storing that information for later. "Humans," he took a sip of energon, "are absolutely _disgusting_ while recharging."

"I'm pretty sure _most_ things are disgusting under a magnifying glass," Sam retorted, stretching her arms and bending her knees but not making any effort to get up just yet. Someone was clearly taking advantage of being able to look 'down' at her, and she was mildly enamored with the idea of miniaturized persons. "How are you feeling?"

"Let's dispense with small-talk," Starscream waved. "I believe you said something about a 'hardware store.'"

"Right." She quickly propped herself up on her elbows to think. "I should... make a list of all the other stuff I'm going to need."

"You said 'we' would go, I distinctly recall." Starscream leaned forward; his expression indicated he planned to be included in ever matter of consequence that transpired from here on out. "How _exactly_ do you presume to enter a marketplace with me? You have made it clear that a Cybertronian of _any_ size is an anomaly in this universe."

"Fortunately 'small' is a little easier to hide than 'big' would have been." She pushed herself to a seat a little apart from him, so she could crack her back side to side without knocking him over. "I need to think of something to put you in."

His eyes narrowed. "You are not 'putting' me anywhere, much less in a _container."_

Sam glanced his way in amusement, and then rolled onto her hands and knees to get off her mattress. "Not what I meant, your lordship. Give me a couple minutes to come up with options, I have to ransack some boxes."

'Lordship' wasn't good enough to get her a wing floof, and Sam worried he'd already caught on to her or otherwise desensitized himself to praise. Alas. He gave her a mild sneer as she started attacking boxes, and some fresh insults rolled out of him: "Your storage system for this habsuite is utterly _inefficient._ "

"I _literally_ moved into this 'habsuite' the morning before _you_ showed up," Sam called back to him A hoodie wouldn't do; she didn't have any with a large enough hood to give him some breathing room on her shoulder. She did have a really great black knitted coat with a deep hood though. Where would that be? 

"Something of a 'fixer-upper' isn't it?"

"You'd be correct," Sam agreed. "This place sat off the market for years in legal limbo, blah blah blah, details about human stuff you don't care about, but it's mine now, blah blah, more details you don't care about, though some of the old furniture got left behind, blah blah— _blah—_ and that's how I got the magic cupboard."

A warm, dark chuckle crossed the room.

Sam bristled, hairs lifting on the back of her neck, goosebumps going down her arms. Alarmed past the point of speech, she twisted about to behold the source of this sacrilege: Starscream was still seated, leaned with his hand on a thigh, contemplative red eyes narrowed on her, and he was smiling. Well, he was _smirking,_ but the smirk wasn't anywhere as near as evil as it ought to have been. 

"At least you don't _overestimate_ your relevance," he hummed. "But _I_ decide what details are beneath me, not _you."_

"Well at this height most of them are _above_ you."

His mouth dropped into a scowl.

Sam slapped a hand over her face to shut herself up.

 _Dammit Sam! He was being nice!  
_ _I know! It was terrifying, Sam! Never let him do it again!_  
 _DAMMIT SAM. Don't you blow this! Positive reinforcement!_

"I take that one back, " Sam apologized. "A Decepticon was smiling at me, it was too intimidating, I panicked. Now you officially owe me a really good height insult, so please work on it, I want to feel _extremely insulted_." She went back to digging for possessions, now looking for a bag.

Starscream almost sounded put-out: "Are you registered as clinically insane by any chance?"

"No. Not unless you're a hallucination."

"Hnh. Would your community refer to you as an eccentric social recluse, then? Perhaps deserving of derision, ostracization, or scorn?"

"W- _ow_ ," she cackled and looked back his way. Somebody was on his game this morning. "Truce, Starscream, _truce."_

"I don't see how that's relevant. I agreed I wouldn't kill you nor otherwise interfere with your construticon duties on this peeling splinter of a residence. I never said I would pretend to enjoy it."

"You have an have an acerbic wit and a sharp _glossa,_ " Sam complimented him handsomely, standing up with her prizes in hand, "and we're both lucky your size makes it charming. Okay!"

He squinted suspiciously are her approach and wrinkled his nasal ridge, offended to be 'charming.'

"Here are your two options for getting into the store without being seen." Sam shouldered on the long knitted cardigan. "Number one: You can ride on my shoulder," she flipped up the hood, "and get unfortunately well acquainted with my hair, but at least have a way to police your visibility."

"Brave of you to allow me so close to your eyes."

"If you wanted to blind me you'd have done it while I was sleeping. Number two," she pulled a purse strap over her head and across her chest: "You ride around in this questionably fashionable women's accessory, and stay ducked down out of sight until we reach an aisle."

Starscream looked from it to her. It. Her. "Why is nearly everything you humans garb yourselves in so tastelessly blob-shaped?"

"Because  _we're_ tastelessly blob-shaped, Starscream,  duh ," argued a human whose cardigan was actually very nicely fitted, with an excellent and voluminous hood. Sam learned forward with a wink. "But don't tell us so, it hurts our feelings."

He pretended to clean dirt out from under his claws. "Indisputably mentally unsound," he muttered to himself.

"As long as I feed you and mind your personal space, you'll put up with me," Sam predicted, feeling as cheeky as she probably sounded. "Anyway! You don't need to decide immediately. I need to eat breakfast and get ready for the day. You want me to move you to the table so you have a more commanding view of the house, or would you rather sit here brooding in the nature of existence for another hour?"

"An-!? That's how long it's going to take you to 'get ready for the day?' " he seemed to find it preposterously long.

"Boy are you lucky you didn't get get saddled with a normal human female," she turned for the door and waved back to him,"I'll try and cut it to forty five minutes."

He rolled his eyes. "Kneel," he demanded, and she turned back in surprise. He was slowly getting to his feet. "And _carry_ me. You can explain the boring details of habsuite acquisition as you prepare yourself, so that _I_ can decide if there is any useful information therein."

Samantha raised her brows but decided he was allowed to keep most of his demanding quirks, particularly if they kept him in a good mood. She stooped, reaching hesitantly for him at about waist level, unsure how he wanted to do this. He stepped back and cleared his voice loudly. Kay, so...?

Sam glanced to his face, looked to her hand, and then instead tried offering her palm up flat to him. He briskly stepped onto the center of her palm, and she stood up and tried to hold him as evenly as possible. He seemed mildly annoyed when 'evenly as possible' wasn't 'still as a piece of proper machinery,' but he didn't comment. His own motor control systems seemed perfectly capable of keeping him balanced on those tiny feet, regardless.

Those tiny, tiny, firm little feet with all their arched and swooping shapes and ridiculously high heels. Which were right there, right in her hand.

_Sam, he's not a toy, and if you start pinching his feet, he is going to murder you.  
Right! Right right right right right._

Sam got him to the dining room table, where he alighted just as effortlessly as he'd embarked.

"The details of this domicile," he prompted, while striding across the table like it was his own little command bridge. Maybe it was. "You _can_ prepare and talk at the same time, can't you?" He glanced back at her disapprovingly. "Or is your ability to multitask mysteriously limited to boring one-liners and shabby accessories?"  


"Says the guy who flinched at the height joke," Sam went to go find her breakfast cereal and called back to him over her shoulder. She intended to eat breakfast in the dining room anyway. "So where was I? Don't answer that. Okay!

"The house belonged to some old woman who wasn't particularly well off. She got put in a nursing home for elderly persons who need assistive care, or at least I imagine that's what happened because all her bedroom furniture was missing when I arrived. Her kids then argued to the death—not literally, metaphorically—over the house until court costs ate up the entire value of the place. The government seized the house and appointed—"

"Stop stop stop stop stop!" Starscream was staring at her from across the dining room table with a horrified, repulsed expression bordering on panic.

Sitting at the dining room table, because by now she'd returned, set up, and had her second spoon of cereal halfway up to her mouth, Samantha was baffled.

 _"Ugh!"_ He spun away from her, made a retching motion, and waved his hand and wings. "Never mind! Finish your refueling and never, ever, for any reason, speak while your mouth is full with those particulates you call 'food' again! Primus—how revolting...!"

Sam...

Sam _lost_ it.

She slapped a hand over her mouth, definitely lost a couple 'particulates' in the rush of air that came up from her lungs, barely managed to swallowed her food, and then she threw back her head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry Starscream, our own moms think we look revolting when we chew with our mouths open ;) or at least that must be why they tell us not to do it.


	12. So, Some Weather We're Having...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone? Stay at home, wash your hands, and read transformers fanfiction. Or write transformers fanfiction. Or, hey, both!

Sam flicked on her blinker and slowed at the light. 

"I don't see what was so funny," a haughty Starscream finally said, quietly, and over an hour too late.

Sam glanced over at where he was perched cross-legged on the arm rest on the passenger side. He wasn't looking at her. His arms were crossed, or, at least, they would have been if one of them didn't currently end halfway to the elbow. His chin was raised and his wings were straight up and down; he was clearly emoting pride, dignity, loftiness.

Sam looked up towards the traffic like and tried to figure him out. Maybe he was pretending the last hour hadn't happened? The hour where he'd looked and acted utterly humiliated?

(A human had laughed at him. Him! He'd given her the cold shoulder, and sulked and refused to speak. She'd gone too far, and had too much fun at his expense. Laughter of that volume, that grade, surely that could only be _mocking_ laughter. Nobody mocks the great Starscream. Ever! She'll pay, they'll all pay!)

Or so Sam had _assumed,_ but now here he was: Soliciting conversation, like he wasn't an invader-of-worlds, or like she could possibly come up with anything interesting to say back to him.

Hmm.

Yesterday had taught her a couple things about this Starscream, chief among them: That Sam _really_ shouldn't trust herself to narrate what he was thinking. He was _not_ a high-functioning idiot, and it was dangerous to have expectations based on the exaggerated character voices of children's cartoons. Small mercies that Transformers Prime had featured some of the franchise's best character studies, so he at least didn't remind her of G1 Starscream proclaiming 'Megatron has fallen!' every time the Decepticon Leader so much as sneezed.

(Did Cybertronians sneeze?)

"Never try to follow me into a closed bathroom," Sam eventually suggested.

"Why?" His wings twitched, ready to dismiss her.

"Well, after we've digested our food... That's where it comes out the other end."

Both wings flew up high with tension and then gave a few hard flaps, like a person quickly shaking their hands free of slimy sensations. "I suppose it's no tidier," Starscream asked, "at that point?"

"No. Not unless we're talking about how human poop is more _compact_. In every other capacity, it's about as 'tidy' as if you divided 'eating' by a thousand."

Starscream shuddered tremendously, and cleared his throat: "Consider your warning, ah, _acknowledged_."

Huh. Starscream was acting nervous, and nervousness was the tone his Transformer's Prime incarnation typically reserved for Autobot jailers and addressing Megatron. Sam tried to figure out where she ranked on Starscream's mental hierarchy of people. Had she gone up a few rungs sometime since that morning? Sam reflexively found herself preferring some unending, arrogant stream of demands and proclamations. Eight inch divas weren't terribly hard to work with, honest!

"I, um," he cleared his throat, "confess to never having ridden in a ground transport before. Voluntarily, anyway."

Jesus Christ, what kind of Starscream was this!? Sam did a double-take. "Are... are we doing small-talk?" 

He snorted and flicked his wings. "Never mind."

"No no." Sam sat back in her seat. "It's a valid conversational prompt. This, uh, this here is a fine example of a boring, unsexy, normal human-built car. Forty thousand miles on it, couple years old, smells vaguely of fast food, and gets a reasonable fuel economy in the range of twenty six miles to the gallon. Runs on regular unleaded gasoline. If you were going to write and direct a movie about awesome transforming robot vehicles and giant explosions, this is not what you'd be putting on the screen."

"It's what _any_ infiltrating alien organism capable of mimicking your vehicles _should_ actually choose," Starscream pointed out. "Minus the odors."

"How's that work for you, being a flier? Fighter jets can be a million dollar investment, each. An extra one showing up without any registration numbers in a crowded hangar probably raises some eyebrows, right?"

"I seldom had to _park_ on any human-owned airstrip overnight. It was the Autobots who chose to hide in plain sight among the local human populace. We Decepticons operated out of a Titan warship. If I were to mimic a human jet, it would only be so as not to attract attention from Autobots and uneducated laymen in the ground; while simultaneously posing on radar and other monitoring equipment as a smaller, privately owned craft to avoid military oversight."

"Huh." They were chatting. Her and her tiny Decepticon. The light turned green. Onward they drove.

Whelp, there could be no other explanation: Samantha had gotten a defective Starscream.

Sure, he was presently exhibiting all the neurotic vocal tics which the story boarders and voice actors of Transformers Prime had lovingly graced their Starscream with. And yes, she'd woken up to him in an ominous and clearly premeditated position looming over her as she slept—where he'd spoken with a dark and liquid charisma hearkening to his IDW incarnation. He'd even been a mean, entitled little brat yesterday, twice!

But he also engaged in behaviors no respectable Starscream would ever be caught dead doing, like _patience._ Or refraining from monologuing his evil schemes out loud. And now, what was this, _chatting_ with a human about cars? It was unconscionable. It simply wasn't allowed within the realm of things which were Starscream. Every other Starscream would be rolling in their grave. 

"That's where we're headed, by the way," Sam gestured with her chin as they rounded the local Outback Steakhouse and saw the looming orange letters ahead of them. "Crossing my fingers you approve of something to fix your arm with."

"What possible purpose does that serve?"

"What-? Oh. Crossing my fingers? It's a luck thing."

"Oh," he said like he'd been confronted by something gross, like chewing gum under a desk, "it's like stridulating before a fight."

"It's like _what_?"

"I'm speaking English."

"Apparently you're speaking fancy science English, and you got a mid-level intelligence human."

He sighed like she was deliberately being irritating, looked up at her with a bored expression, and then swiftly ran his forearm over his leg plating, making a sharp scraping noise, like the sound of swords crossing. " _Stridulating_ ," he explained. "Completely pointless—doubly so if you have no natural peening file or melee weapons—but _some_ idiots think it makes them look cool."

"Oh."

Despite admitting to herself she really didn't understand this Starscream, and despite the extremely small cast of Transformers Prime, Samatha suddenly the surest feeling they were talking about Skywarp. Now Sam might have been out on a limb with that one, because she didn't even know if Starscream's universe _had_ a Skywarp, or if 'seekers' were a thing, or if 'trines' were a thing, or if Starscream even knew or cared who Skywarp was. But there was just something to the texture of the way he'd said it, of the stress placed on ' _some idiots,_ ' that felt like it could belong to none other than the speaker's slightly stupid younger brother—or, you know, whatever the nearest equivalent was when you were all a bunch of robots. 

Maybe not, though: Starscreams were usually in charge of some kind of armada, leading flight frames or clones or drones into battle. They could potentially be referring to any _number_ of idiots. She'd have to ask him later. For now, she parked the car, turned off the engine, turned to him, and asked:

"So, have you decided? Hood or handbag?"

Starscream sighed, eyeballing the Home Depot logo over the dash like he was preparing to be very much disappointed. Then he rolled his eyes to her. "Hold out your hand," he demanded, and began to stand up.

Samantha obeyed, and he stepped off the arm rest and onto the meat of her palm.

"Your shoulder," he instructed, and she lifted him carefully up and towards the edge of her hood. He knelt and reached forward with his hand, and transferred himself slowly into the alcove between her hair and the hood edge.

"Is it horrible?" she asked.

"Awful," he confirmed, staying seated and flicking irritably at stray hairs with his wrist. "Smelling of must, drying organic oils, and some kind of noxious, cloying, artificial flora. But it will suffice."

Who said guys smelling your hair had to be sexy, right? Sam gave him a thumbs up, pulled the parking break, and got out of the car.

They were off to buy themselves some hardware.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what's better than one tiny seeker?  
> Three tiny seekers. 
> 
> And one of them *still* somehow adopts a dog.


	13. Old and Slow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When last we saw our intrepid heroes, they were looking for arm repair supplies.

There weren't many people in the Home Depot at this hour; and when you were trying to smuggle around a tiny imp that loved the sound of his own voice as much as Starscream did, a lack of potential witnesses was a blessing.

Not that he was being chatty _now_ or anything, he was definitely treating this outing like a form of undercover mission. Sam self-consciously adjusted her hood to make absolutely sure he was hidden, and got herself a cart so she could manage a buffer space directly in front of her and otherwise feel comfortable taking her time and loitering in front of any aisle of products.

Then she took off clear past the bathroom and kitchen sets to get to the raw ingredients that held a house together. She may have pushed the cart very fast and stepped onto the rear bar to ride it as it drifted along, but since only Starscream was there as a witness, and he wouldn't have known anything was obscenely childish about this, who was to say whether she did or did not? No proof existed! None!

They passed an aisle of physical fasteners like nails and screws. Starscream was just too small to think that any screw feasible for house improvement could possibly by applied to him safely. Even the miniature screws used for computer hardware could have substituted for his entire hip joint. While it might be possible for Starscream to _make_ small enough fasteners using a bit of wire, it still seemed prudent to look at _chemical_ fasteners first. 

"Adhesives, sealants... Okay!" Sam followed the hanging signs and turned her cart into the chosen aisle. There they passed tube after tube of brand after brand of chemical after chemical used as household adhesives: Silicones, epoxies, plasters, caulks, cements, glues, tapes, it was all here. She stopped about mid-aisle, looking left and right.

"Hmm," Starscream said beside her ear, and the resonant sound conveyed a lot.

"Yeah. There's good news and bad news: And both are that we have a lot of options. Do you speak chemicals?"

"Yes, but I haven't X-ray vision," growled a tiny robot, "so unless you start turning bottles around for me, we're trapped here pointlessly staring at a wall of I Can't Believe It's Not Glue, endlessly speculating on what is so unbelievable about the contents."

She rolled her eyes and started to present the silicone bottles' ingredients lists to him. "You could just say, 'Start turning bottles around for me.'"

A wry note of amusement lilted into his time: "Where's the fun in _that?_ Mn, but I suppose I do enjoy knowing my orders will be followed. Start heading left from here. Left and up."

"Got it. I'm going to pull out my phone out with the other hand, so I look like I'm googling ideal products."

"You're doing _what_ to ideal products?"

(Did his universe not have Google!?) "I'm... searching for them on the... internet." 

"Nh, _human_ _slang_ ," he groaned with disgust.He sounded gently muffled, like he had his working hand over his mouth and lower jaw, and was working out for himself what chemicals were going to be easiest to use. That was understandable. Not only did they have to stopper up his arm in a durable manner, but they also had to do so while removing the rest of the temporary wax seal from the site, which possibly meant they'd be submerging the injury in hot water.

Sam pulled up some old favorite links about 'fixing holes in rubber/metal/plastic.' She didn't actually know which of those three materials they were primarily going to be working with. What were Starscream's energon veins made of? What metal was _he_ primarily made of, steel? "If you don't like any of these options," she mentioned, "we can always sit down and brainstorm whatever it is you need, like, say, a soldering iron or a—"

"Be quiet, I'm thinking."

Apparently she’d been correct in bringing them to an adhesives and filler aisle. To be honest, her brain had mostly asked 'what will do the same job as wax but better?' and jumped immediately to, 'silicone!'

"Turn around the bottle on the right. Bring it closer. No, the other one, up, look up girl. There, that—"

—someone else turned down the same aisle as them, and Starscream lowered his voice and shrank back against her shoulder. Instead of just passing on by, the passerby called out, "Good morning!"

Sam glanced just enough to make out an orange apron on a man about her own age. Oh great. Store helpers. "'Morning," she muttered noncommittally, trying to signal the man not to approach.

"Anything I can help you with today?"

"Nope," Sam kept her voice tight to indicate he should move on past her, "thank you, I'm just looking."

"Finding everything okay?"

Sometimes even when you tried every trick in the book to deflect attention from yourself, you were simply matched against a person who couldn't read body language. Alright, so: This was either a dogged flirtation attempt, an offer to mansplain, or an innocent extrovert who just couldn't take a hint. She tried to remain nice and hurry him along in the hint taking process: "Yup, I wanted sealant and I found all the sealant I could ever want. I'm great."

"Oh, great! What in particular are you working on? Is this a bathroom project?"

Sam actually did have a bathroom on her project list. She also intended to research, find, and purchase _that_ sealant entirely in her own. "Not yet it's not."

"I can probably help you out faster than your phone," insisted a man she refused to make eye contact with, wearing what sounded like an unfailing smile. Sam considered asking Starscream if he had any more missiles. 

"Hey," Sam finally clarified, turning her head to smile thinly at the man while still occluding Starscream on her far shoulder. "I really, really, really, _really_ don't want help."

The man hesitated and then only smiled more, "Aallriiightt," he said slowly, like he was giving her one more chance to jump on this free help deal he was offering. "It's just that I have a lot of experience in renovation because I recently just helped my grandparents build a fully—"

"You are seriously interrupting my alone time with this wall of sealant," Sam intoned mysteriously. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"Uh, okay!" the man chimed brightly. "If you need help finding anything, you can come to the register, ask for Chet. Okay?"

"I will not do that, but okay," Sam gave him a very sarcastic thumbs up.

And then, praise Unicron the unmaker, 'Chet' finally went away. Only to stop at the far end of the aisle and start talking to another employee, while pointing her way and clearly talking about her. Sam glared temporarily in that direction in the hopes NotChet was better at taking hints. NotChet seemed to recognize a woman on a mission, and patted Chet's shoulder and led him away.

Sam really hoped the poor kid wasn't secretly depressed, and that interacting with her wasn't the callous final shove of a universe about to send him teetering over the brink.Hopefully, he was just as ridiculously full of good cheer as he seemed, and floated through all the days of his life like this: Blissfully ignorant.

She let out a breath, shook her head, and looked back to the wall of sealant. Then, because she knew deep down she'd been rude, but simultaneously the persistence of the interaction _still_ bothered her, she tilted her head and peered down at Starscream from the corner of her eye. "Am I an asshole for being mean to friendly people?" she asked him, somewhat rhetorically. Starscream actually answered:

"That blood bag was so annoying I am _astonished_ the proper social protocol for dealing with him was not kicking him through a wall."

That got a snicker out of Sam. A Decepticon approved of her priorities. That should probably fill her with shame; Where was Optimus Prime's stern disapproving mouthless frown when you needed it!? "It's possible he was trying to show off," she supposed, now attempting to defend her fellow man.

"Show off _what_ , his capacity to annoy and irritate!?"

"I... I don't know, his fitness as a handyman?" Sam said with a big shrug. "I haven't been properly flirted with since I got taller than most men, so we're going to have to chalk this episode up to overzealous friendliness and dangerously high levels of helpfulness. Probably useful to the swarms of old people wandering through looking for new sinks, or random joes adding on a deck for summer barbecue parties."

Starscream was silent a moment before demanding, "Are your gender roles seriously affected by metrics as absurd as a few inches of height?! Don't answer that," he groaned, and wiped hand down his face, "such a backwards species, culturally."

"Starscream," she snapped her fingers in front of him, "focus, Starscream, we are out in public for glue, not to get into deep philosophical conversation about cultural nuances and gender roles. Save insulting me and/or gender inequality for when we're safely back at home and I can properly enjoy it."

"Right, right, right," he muttered, craning forward again to see the different bottles. "Lift your hand. Further. Little to the right. Yes, that one. Let me see that one. Your language is so inefficient for these tasks. I don't suppose you'd understand any coordinate systems?"

Maybe Sam had him on this one: "Assuming a two dimensional coordinate plane, negative sixty degrees clockwise, vector amplitude of four inches?" 

"...That's nearly as verbally inefficient as repeated 'little to the rights.' In Cybertronian the same can be said in four syllables."

Sam was still pretty sure she'd won. "How about you number the shelves and count how many products left or right you want me to move."

Starscream actually wanted to move sections entirely: "Do they have primers here? Ugh. The range of vision afforded by your 'hood' is severely limiting."

"That's the _point_ , Starscream." She wheeled her cart around and headed down the aisle. "Just be glad Chet and his friend didn't come back this way, I might have thrown caution to the wind and let you claw their eyes out."

"...Really?" He sounded almost hopeful.

"No not really, that's illegal and childish. The end result would be me in jail and you leaving my ass to rot—only for you to belatedly realize you have no idea how to successfully transport and use sealant guns bigger and heavier than you are. But! You can be sure I was fantasizing about it."

He clicked his tongue and tutted. "All talk and no follow through." 

Sam did a double take and wrinkled her nose. Was he playing with her? "Hush, you," she admonished like she would a puppy, "before I overstep my bounds and start tickling your feet every time you sass me. Now! What kind of primer are we looking for? Presumably something you can use under water?"

Starscream, for his part, seemed rightly offended that there existed a quadrant of a multiverse in which 'tickling your adversary's feet' was a valid counter-play to sass. But Sam took no credit for that. Starscream was the one with the positively dainty-looking feet, after all. Any sane would have come to the same foot-tickling conclusions, surely. Unless they'd been stabbed with those feet, and lit on fire by them, which, come to think of it, Sam had been.

"I’m going to choose to ignore that comment," he announced magnanimously, except for how the last syllable ended razor sharp.

Uh oh. Well, much as Sam didn't think he'd have started a fire in her hair in a public place (and subsequently risk her abandoning him there), Sam also decided, _ya know what,_ she'd just rather not chance it. She responded with a thumbs up.

"And yes, that is exactly what we are looking for, preferably one of those ridiculously exuberant products that totes patching holes underwater like some kind of miracle science."

"It is our planet's only widespread naturally occurring liquid..."

Starscream had his nose permanently upturned to water, it seemed, which was terribly funny for a person who'd relaxed in it for over an hour and made such sinfully blissful faces at the experience. " _Pitiful_ , everywhere, and it oxidizes _everything_."

"You have the attention span of a gnat," she fired back. "Hurry up, grandma, and either decide what primer you want or start giving coordinates for alternate bottles."

Starscream nearly pitched off her shoulder in surprise. "' _Grandma!?'_ " he squawked. 

Sam asked like he was dumb: "Are you or are you not old enough to be my Grandma?" 

"That's isn't—How dare you insinuate—I am of an infinitely—Biological inheritance doesn't—I'm not even a— _That's not how anything about any of this works, at all!"_

"Of course it isn't, it just means you're _old and slow!_ "

The seething, worked up, indignant _squeal_ of disapproval he made at her was her only warning that she was about to be kicked in the face. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooooh. Sam, honey, I'm pretty sure calling a seeker 'slow' is on the Cybertronian list of top ten famous last words. C'mon sweetheart, you should know this, you're probably some kind of horrible superfan.


	14. Status Quo

Thankfully, 'Chet' was not working the register.

But a kindly round man named Bill was, and when he saw Sam approaching with a hand over her face and red visible on her fingertips, he quickly took her aside and pulled out a first aid kid to patch her up with. Starscream's stiletto heel had slashed her cheek and lip and she could feel a groove on her tooth she _hoped_ was minor and wouldn't require any dental work.

Sam could have probably taken care of herself in the women's restroom, but she didn't want to be left alone with a tiny robot lest she be tempted to injure him in retaliation, so for once she actually accepted some help. It was worth it. Bill got her to tilt her head back, flushed the wound, gave her some ointment to put on it, and then used a small adhesive butterfly suture that made it a little easier for her to talk and smile without pulling open the edge of the cut. 

"Sorry," Sam tried to say while the old guy patched her up. "And thanks, I'm not normally this clumsy."

"Oh you'd be surprised how many 'handy' men manage to shoot themselves showing off a nail gun," Bill chuckled. "Think I've seen you in here before, even, you bought a drill, didn't you? Yeah. Are you up to date with your tetanus shots?" 

"Uh, yeah. I think so. I'll check when I get home. Can you, uh, can you not tell-?"

Bill held up his hands in innocent ignorance. "I saw nothing." He put away the kit. "Were you able to find everything okay?"

"Yeah I'm... I'm still only halfway through the shopping trip."

"Alright! Won't get in your way." And, indeed, he headed right back to the register, just in time to help a customer check out. 

Sam patted gingerly at her face, ran her tongue back and forth across her tooth, and walked quickly back towards where she'd left her cart. Starscream, the miserable bitch, shouldered his way up out of her purse and grinned at her. She shot him a glare. 

"Oh don't worry," he purred silkily, "I'm sure that'll _buff right out._ "

Sam overshot the sealant aisle, waltzed past the power tools, grabbed an angle grinder off a display, and waved it threateningly at him. Starscream, apparently believing this to be an act, didn't cow from her. He grinned, red eyes gleaming, and stayed outside the purse just long enough to make sure she knew he wan't afraid of her. Only then did he slowly duck back down into the bag and out of sight. 

Sam resisted the urge to do worse, much worse. He was tiny. _So tiny._ She could kill him by zipping the purse closed and throwing him into the appliance of her choice. She could flatten him with her car wheel. She could probably break most of his limbs just by slamming the purse to the ground and stomping repeatedly with her heel. _She_ needed to be the _adult_ here.

...God willing, Starscream would be smart enough to stay out of sight while she dug out her shopping list and filled her cart with home improvement supplies.

* * *

Starscream was getting impatient. 

He'd waited for her to continue shopping. Every time the cart had moved and stopped, move and stopped, moved and stopped, he'd suppressed a sign of annoyance.

Once back in the car, he'd climbed out of the purse and up onto the car headrests (so demeaning, to be reduced to climbing instead of the grace of flight!) to watch as she'd loaded bag after bag of supplies into the rear seat and trunk. 

He'd waited through traffic on the way back to the domicile, and then, naturally, he'd expected his arm to be their number one priority upon arrival.

Instead, he found himself waiting _again_ , wings upright and quivering its barely repressed anger. She'd left him with her lumpy shapeless bag upon a table just inside the front door, and then she'd turned around again and headed back out to the car! He leaned as far as he could over the lip of the table, and scowled when it afforded him no vision. Looking around himself, he decided the only course of action was to get his legs and working arm around one of the table legs and slide to floor.

Unfortunately he misjudged how long she'd be out there, and was nearly kicked when she reentered the house with bags draped all over her arms.

"Ex _cuse_ me!" he projected, and she jumped in place and glanced down at him just in time. But instead of stopping, she wove around him and headed for her demolished kitchen. Annoyed, Starscream decided he needed to climb back up something again. The wood of the table would take too much effort; he picked a cardboard box stacked up beside the door on the opposite side. "I am ready for—" he called to her, but she walked right past him again and headed back outside.

Starscream glared. Was it possible she truly hadn't heard him? Possible, human senses were utterly inferior to Cybertronian ones.

He climbed two boxes high and then saw this had put the lip of a window sill in range. Pushing blinds out of the way and stepping up to the glass gave Starscream a view of the car, and of the human girl bent over and pulling bags out of the rear seat. He crossed his arms... or _tried_ , and then began tapping his foot against the sill. 

She left the car, again, and—again!—she left the doors and trunk all flung open, a sure sign she intended to return to them for even more bags. 

Well, very well: She intended to complete her errand in _full_ before moving to the next task. That was annoying _to him_ but it was at least consistent with a completionist work ethic, and thus no fault could truly be found with it. 

* * *

"Oh stop moaning and griping and _hurry up already!"_ Starscream finally shouted, after muttering things to a similar tune for the last fifteen minutes or so. Apparently rather than take a hint, Starscream's key takeaway from her silent treatment had been that he needed to _shout louder._

Samantha squinted at him over her bowl of canned soup, and ran her tongue over the groove in her tooth again. 

Every single time she opened her mouth to eat the soup, her lip hurt. Every time she smiled, it hurt. Every time she moved her face in any expression it all, it hurt. And the tomato of her soup getting into her cut? Also hurt! She must have been wincing and grimacing at the pain, because as far as she was aware, she hadn't 'moaned' or 'griped' or said so much as a single word to him. 

Before breaking that silent streak, Sam considered her words carefully. "You chipped my _tooth_ ," she finally told him.

"Who cares!?" he demanded rhetorically. "It's been over an hour; how long do you intend to mope around like a kicked turbo fox? You should be ashamed of how pathetic you're being! Not everything is about you, and it’s frankly _sad_ how much attention you seem to think you deserve over so minor an injury! Go and see one of your medics and have your dentae replaced, if it bothers you so much! Meanwhile, we have an _actual medical emergency_ on our hands!" He waggled his arm stub for emphasis. 

Sam took in a slow, calming breath through her nose. "Human teeth don't _heal_ , Starscream. They can't be replaced without severely damaging the surrounding tissue. We really only get one set, and it has to last us eighty years, and then we die."

Starscream rolled his eyes so dramatically that it rolled his whole head and the top of his wings with them. "Primus help me, it’s the lifespan melodrama. Well don't worry then, you won't need them very long, and it’s not like they were going to stay in pristine condition any—"

"Starscream," she ground out. "It is not socially acceptable to hit someone, much less permanently damage them, just because they've annoyed or offended you."

He turned an open-mouthed gape to her, and then suddenly his face lit up with mocking levity and he burst out laughing at her assertion. "Oh really?" he asked. "And where did you get that cutesy notion, hmm?" He purred, "Because unless I'm mistaken, _that's_ the thing that finally shut you up."

Sam slapped her hand down on the rickety table, kicked her chair back, and stood. Starscream stumbled and fell to a knee. More surprising was that he raised his arm towards her and, somehow, she saw another missile had appeared—out of where, exactly?—and was primed to fire at her.

Was it intimidating to have someone strike a table hard enough to start up a localized earthquake? And then loom hundreds of 'feet' into the air above you? Good. He deserved to be intimidated. "Starscream," she said. "Put that away, and stop acting like a child, moaning impatiently about how you want things done one instant and then jumping at loud noises the second. It’s embarrassing."

His eyes widened and his face screwed up in a mixture of displeasure, anger, and perhaps embarrassment. A tense instant passed between them. Then she heard a little click, and the missile slid away into his forearm again, the weapon hatches shutting closed around it. "Er, of, of course, that was just—"

"Stop." She lifted up a hand. "My mouth hurts, and I don't have the mental energy to argue with you right now. So in order to make sure things go smoothly for this afternoon, and that you get your arm repaired in a timely manner with no more delays, you are going to sit there, and shut up, and listen to me say my piece for the next fifteen minutes or so. You don't have to say anything; you don't have to answer any hypothetical questions, or rate my suppositions; you aren't to interject at all, and you are to maintain eye contact so I know you are paying attention. After that, I am going to into the bathroom to have a look at what you did to my face, and, when I come out, we will work on your arm."

Starscream sneered and opened his mouth to say something.

She raised her brows and stared him down. She could think of so many ways to 'delay' fixing his arm. Her caution was thrown to the winds right now. She would go and get that Megatron toy, and she would pitch it through the cupboard, and she would tell him, "It's Starscream's Fault." What Megatron wouldn't believe it?

Starscream must have somehow seen the promise of Megatron in her death glare, because he wisely shut his mouth.

Sam waited a second longer to make sure he understood her instructions. Then she calmly retook her seat.

"I'm aware," she started the monologue, "that you just left an active, post-apocalyptic war, in which a level of violence and manual discipline is frankly unavoidable. But that's not where you are now. You aren't in a dog-eat-dog world, you're not scrambling for the basic necessities for survival, you're not at risk of being jumped by enemy soldiers at every turn. You're in a calm, civilized place, and here it is inappropriate, illegal, and childish to physically lash out at people."

Starscream bristled tremendously.

"Now, if I were somehow dangerous to you, or callous and unfeeling towards your situation, it would be necessary for you to exert social dominance over me to get what you want. But it's not. It's not like you had to signal a large predator that you're poisonous and spiky and would make a bad meal. We aren't presently competing for resources, so you haven't just carved yourself out a position as the alpha lion who gets to eat first. There is no social relationship between you and I that is improved upon in any way by you demonstrating you are willing to harm me. 

"All it shows is that you lack _self control_."

He let out a sharp vent of air in a hiss, but she lifted a hand and growled:

"You just wasted the last hour of our lives trying to convince me—me!—that striking me was no big deal and I should let you off the hook without consequences. Well _unfortunately for you,_ I'm not that easy to persuade, and utterly independent of anything you can say right now, _I'm tempted to impose consequences._ Any word that comes out of your mouth can only _possibly_ make the temptation worse."

He grimaced, recoiling a bit as he tried to evaluate what those consequences might be. 

She took a deep breath and tilted her head. "Maybe you've been programmed to believe any kindness is a show of weakness, and you have to predate on that weakness wherever you find it. Well, we have a saying here on earth: Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Just because someone's soft one second doesn't mean they'll always be soft.

"In light of that, I don't know why you're so proud of yourself for making me bleed. Maybe it's because you've spent eons surrounded by people who don't respect you for your considerable tactical skills, and you don't know how to use your equally considerable charisma to make them like you, so the only way you've ever managed to make them listen to you is by bullying and threatening them with violence.

"Maybe it’s because you just came out of a thousand year—or million year, I don’t even know what the time scale is in your universe—submersion in a violent, toxic, military culture where everything is resolved like animals biting each other's throats for dominance—"

"Are you seriously," he mocked, unable to restrain himself, "trying to psycho-analyze me?"

"Or _maybe_ it really is the power differential itself that set you off," Sam continued grimly. "Maybe the reason you think you need to cut me a few times is because you're used to being in a relationship where the other person can crush you to pieces in a heartbeat, and yet you have to manage some fucked up, perverse balancing act between prostrating yourself on their mercy and biting back hard and often to remind them you're still sharp as ever and worth keeping around. Maybe you're stuck repeating the dance steps of an abusive relationship."

Starscream's head flew up so hard it was a wonder he didn't get whiplash. Red eyes cycled open wide. His mouth was a thin line.

"But that's not what you're facing now, and, frankly it would be an _unflattering_ pattern to see you falling into. Whatever your issue is, be it that or anything else, you need to sit down and seriously consider how to manage your own emotions. Because the next time you intentionally hurt me, we're going to have serious problems.

"You are very, very small, Starscream. You can't fly, you can't take care of yourself, you can't pay the bills and source fresh energon cubes; you don't even know how to bathe yourself and that's why you still have adorable black streaks on your nose." ( He twitched, reflexively reaching for his face.)  "Even if I hold true to my promise to get you back to your dimension, there are a lot of ways to go about that which don't involve stuffing you with energon, pouring you hot baths, making sure you have a cozy place to sleep, and otherwise letting you have the run of the house."   


The seeker was looking more and more uncertain of himself and more and more confused about where this conversation was headed, or why. He couldn't figure out if he was being insulted, lectured, or threatened.

"I didn't ask  anything  from you other than that you behave yourself," Sam reminded him. "And you're failing at that. Not just because you apparently can't control violent impulses, not just because you're easily offended and think being offended justifies whatever the hell comes out of you, but mostly because you were so determined  to cast everything you do in a credible light that you'd spend  hours  of our time trying to get me to submit to the 'logic' that I should let you hit me.

"That's absurd. That's grossly delusional with regards to the situation in which you find yourself. Nobody is going to let you hit them.

"In fact, nobody has to help you do  _anything at all,_ Starscream. You are receiving a  gift, freely given and with no expectation of receiving anything in exchange. You don't have to act obsequious about that gift, as, frankly, that would make me uncomfortable. You can continue bombarding me with smack-talk and insults ninety nine percent of the time. We're good on that aspect.

"But you need to value it _as a gift,_ not as a due. When you've screwed up badly enough to actually hurt _me_ , you need to cut _yourself_ down a notch, stop justifying your actions, take a deep breath— _control your emotions briefly_ —and do something to fix the situation. You have lots of options for fixing any situation. You can apologize for your mistake, you can be respectfully silent, or you can go out of your way to demonstrate you are grateful for the help I'm giving you—even if you don't actually feel very grateful!—because that's just what's _socially acceptable behavior_. That's what maintains the social status quo. That's how you maintain a reliable supply of help from another person.  


"If you can't find it in yourself to be nice, Starscream, you at least need to _correctly manipulate me_ so that I happily give you what you want, and to that end, it is an _invalid_ strategy to try gaslighting me.

"And that's it. That's all I have to say to you. I'm done, and if you have anything you want to say in response, you need to save it for later, like after dinner, so that I don't snap right here and now and get a shouting contest with you, because I - am - _pissed._ "


	15. Introductions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter defied my attempt to split it in two. Staunchly refused. Insisted it was better exhibited all together. At last it forced me to concur: It is.

Anyone who'd ever observed a woman in high heels should know they weren't the quietest of shoes, and for all his diminutive size, Starscream's feet made the same sharp clicks. On softer materials it might have gone unnoticed, but he was crossing linoleum tile, and the sound carried. 

Sam had finished looking at her face and was draining blisters from the burns he'd given her the day they'd met. The cuts on her fingers had sealed, but needed to be wiped clean and bandaged back tightly together lest they give in to the temptation to split open again. She knew you weren't supposed to put hydrogen peroxide or isopropyl alcohol on wounds after that first day when you were trying to clean out debris and bacteria, but she also didn't have any sterile saline to wipe her hands clean with either. She ended up settling for soapy water.

Then: Click, click, click, click. He slowed briefly on reaching the bathroom door, maybe recalling her advice about never following her in there. But, then again, the door was flung wide open and she definitely wasn't on the toilet. He took that as his invitation to enter.

He also wasn't feeling contrite.

"Y-you—!" He shouted combatively from the floor, pitch strung out and wavering all over the place, "Y-you don't _know_ me!"

Sam took in a deep, slow breath through her nose and counted to ten as she washed her hands. Then she glanced at him with her eyes shuttered, so he knew her attention was begrudged. His wings were up and sharply angled, and he was pointing angrily up at her.

"You don't know me, you don't know a-anything about me! And you keep making all these assumptions, like you know me; talking to me like you would a-a-a _CONFIDENT_ of some kind, but you are NOT, you have _never_ met me before, and you have _no right_ to act as if you have! None!"

Sam turned off the faucet, shook her hands dry, and patted them clean with a clean wash cloth. She turned away from him, tucked the bandages into the crook of her arm, and used her elbow to knock the toilet seat cover down so she could sit on it.

"Are you listening to me!?"

Sam sat. She got antibiotic ointment cream out of its tube and onto her fingers. Starscream stood at the far end of the bathroom, wings quivering with rage (or nervousness). He stamped his foot. He looked for a moment like he was going to shout for her attention, _demand_ that it be invested back with him. Instead what he blurted was:

"You haven't even given me a _designation_ for yourself! Every conversational exchange between us hinges on your presumption of preexisting knowledge. _Incorrect_ knowledge!"

"Did you ask?" 

"Did I ask _what!?"_

"Did you ask what my name was?"

He jerked his chin up, lip trembling with anger, and accused, "You never had to ask _mine._ "

"Okay." She set down the tube of ointment upon the sink, and smiled tightly at him. "You're right. May I have the pleasure of your designation, mister strange, unearthly, metallic organism I have just met?"

He balked at the way she'd reframed the conversation and forced him to answer a question she already knew the answer to. Then he gathered his wits back to him, decided he liked the opportunity after all, and hiked up his wings even higher. "I am _Wing Commander Starscream,_ second in command only to Lord Megatron himself, and leader of the Decepticon Armada!"

"I'm humbled to meet you, Wing Commander Starscream," Sam puppeted back to him, and then tilted her head and raised her brows expectantly. She wasn't in the mood to let him win.

Starscream fumbled when he realized it was his turn to ask her name; and that, no, she would not actually show any signs of being humbled; and that, yes, he was being dragged through some kind of egalitarian social ritual which he really had no choice but to play a part of, because he'd _asked_ for it.

First he looked angry at being set up. Then he looked peeved. Then his wings gave up their rigid posture, and he glared about in irritation. "What..." He huffed and rubbed his hand across his face. "What is your designation, human?"

"Samantha Bernadette Patterson," Sam replied, with satisfaction.

"Are all humans named such ridiculous collections of nonsense syllables?" he growled.

"Yes. We also shorten our names for convenience's sake. Most people call me Sam."

" _Sam_ ," he repeated, sounding calmer now. He did try to regain his previous momentum: "You know _nothing else_ about me."

"No. You're right," she agreed, and would have folded her hands had they not presently been the subject of her medical ministrations. Instead, she held them awkwardly out like a surgeon trying not to contaminate nonexistent gloves. "We're at a disadvantage, here, because I know a lot about the _fictional_ character of Starscream, but most of it is probably twisted or dumbed down or outright wrong. Kids' sci-fi isn't a proper substitute for nuanced character dossiers. I know a _caricature,_ that's it."

Starscream huffed. Then he was quiet for a long moment, possibly grinding his teeth, looking off at nothing and swiveling a little in place—visibly thinking.

She took that opportunity to pull out some bandages and strip the paper with her teeth. 

"What media form?" he suddenly demanded.

She glanced up and asked, her teeth still grit so she could hold onto the bandage. "Transformers? It's a big multi-media franchise, mostly used to sell articulated figurines. _Toys._ It's been around from decades; multiple comics, cartoons, novelizations, and movies. Every couple years they do a reboot and tell the same story all over again, except completely different. Tone's different, target audience is different, themes are different."

"And why do _you_ possess toys from a kid's show?" he growled, before alighting upon a possible answer to his own question: " _Nostalgia?_ "

She flashed a grin as she got the bandages around her hand. "No, I'm one of those weird social recluse types, remember?"

He made a noise in his throat.

She discarded the bandage paper and leaned forward to address him. "A lot of the comics tend to be darker and more adult. And I like collecting attractive things."

It was easy to tell when Starscream was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, because his waist and pelvis were so slender that they visibly swayed. He seemed to be trying to calculate whether he'd heard her correctly, and whether she'd just complimented him. He also became distracted by a few things in the surrounding environment, and she caught him glancing at her hands and back up to her face... as if only just noticing she'd been in the middle of something.

"Do you want to do this now?" Sam finally asked.

He blinked. "Pardon?"

"This conversation," she asked. "Or do you want to put it aside for now and maybe get back to it later?" She gestured to indicate his arm. 

He rubbed self consciously at the stump, his body language now pulled in and uncertain again, his wings down, his shoulders slightly hunched. "Y-yes. That... that sounds prudent."

She modded. "Do you want me to carry you, or do you want to return to the dining room table on your own?"

"I... had to jump down partway," he admitted without meeting her eyes. "To the, ehm, chair."

Presumably he was confessing he had no way back _up_ to the table. Sam took that as a good-enough, 'pick me up, please,' as translated from Starscreamese.

Because, much as he might claim otherwise, she _did_ actually know a few things about him by now.

* * *

"Okay," Sam thought out loud as she took the heated pitcher out of the microwave and brought it in to sit alongside the rest of their resources.

Earlier, at the store, Sam had angrily grabbed a number of products Starscream had been eyeballing before the face-kicking-incident. Based on the present lack of caustic commentary, she'd must have managed to get everything. The tubes of sealant and primer were laid out in a row, and Sam had some pliers on hand for cutting them open.

Also beside the sealant, Sam had laid out some other supplies she suspected Starscream might want or need: Acetone, in case some wax wouldn't come clean; rubbing alcohol, so he could evaporate away any remaining water and prevent oxidation; and a couple little tiny squares of sand paper, just in case he needed an abrasive surface to get something stubborn off himself.

"What are we missing?" she asked him and herself.

"Something to spread the sealant with," Starscream muttered. "Unless I'm to use my fingers and wipe free the excess."

Sam held up a finger to indicate 'wait here' and quickly returned with a couple different potential tools. She laid them out for his assessment: a Q-tip, a fine paintbrush for figurines, a toothpick, and some paper towel in case he did have to use his fingers and wipe away the excess. Starscream selected and broke a quarter off the tooth pick with his foot, and stomped the broken edge flat; just like that, he'd made himself a sort of wooden spatula. 

Sam arranged a number of cups and bowls. "How do you want us to do this?"

"Pour the water," Starscream gestured to a teacup. "I'll submerge the afflicted limb. Be ready with the brand of sealant that can cure under water."

Sam held up one of four tubes and showed it to him.

"Yes, that one. With luck, my self repair has sealed the energon line closed, and we won't need to use it. I'll be able to clean and prime the injury and use the other," he pointed with his foot, " _better_ formula. If _not,_ if I begin bleeding out while the wax is melting, we'll need to hurriedly stopper up the hole."  
  
"Okay. Do you want to eat before we start?" _She_ sure had, or as much as her throbbing lip injury had allowed.

He thought about it, glanced her up and down, and then quietly nodded. She fetched one of his energon cubes from the bedroom, and passed it to him, and he took a deep drink and set it behind him. She was reminded of a person setting aside their beer. Did his universe have high-grade or engex or whatever the equivalent of alcohol was? Questions for later.

He and she were _both_ more subdued now. This was either going to work, or it wasn't, or it'd _sorta work;_ they both needed a clear head for whatever kind of emergency cropped up.

Sam poured a (normal sized) teacup full of boiling water. Starscream plunged his arm into it with a mild wince. Little gobs of wax began escaping, and emerged to float along the surface of the water in colorful disks. Sam waited quietly with him. He'd doubtless say something if he smelled or felt or otherwise noticed an energon leak.

Rather quickly, new wax disks stopped appearing. Starscream swished his arm through the water. Sam helped him out by tilting the cup so he could get his arm in sort of sideways and let the last of the wax escape. 

"How we doing?" she asked him. 

"The energon line is staying closed. It’s searing on the healing polymer..."

"Is that bad?"

He shook his head once. "Just painful."

Sam glanced around. She kept the cup at that angle for him, but discarded the unneeded underwater-curing sealant and reached for the alcohol instead. She dipped the cotton swap in alcohol, pinched the excess out, broke off both tips, and gave him them one at a time.

Starscream didn't have to ask what they were for; apparently bathing skills were too advanced for him, but medical care was not. He pulled his stub free of the cup, used the dry swap to dab his arm free of water, and used the alcohol-dipped one to do a quick clean of the metal. Then they opened up the tube of primer, and he used his toothpick spatula to get it into the broken internals of his arm.

It was a slow and ginger process. He didn't want to stab himself with a splinter of wood and end up bleeding all over again. His mouth was set in a determined line. She pulled over a chair so she could sit and watch. She got the remaining hot water out of his way. She leaned her elbows on the table.

"Quick question," Sam didn't mean to distract him, but it felt important: "Were you injured before you got to my dimension?"

"Was my arm already off, do you mean?" He seemed to have thought of the same thing she had, and perhaps briefly entertained pinning the blame on her, before deciding against it and answering honestly: "Yes. I didn't have any expectation of seeing it again."

She felt a little better that she hadn't _caused_ the maiming, but she did wonder about the coincidence of timing. Was it really the case that he'd lost his arm in his home dimension at the exact time Sam had broken the figure in her dimension? 

_Unlikely,_ Sam realized. The little figurine from The Indian and the Cupboard had been a real historical figure, plucked out of time. If Sam's cupboard was also magical, then why shouldn't it have the same time-traveling abilities? What if it was possible that Sam's cupboard had grabbed Starscream from a _specific_ place in his own timeline, because only that _exact moment_ had perfectly matched the state of Sam's broken toy?

She'd suggest it to him later. They still had a very long road ahead of them if they were to figure out how to send him home.

"It says to leave the primer to cure for thirty minutes," Starscream's voice brought her back to the present.

Sam nodded, tapped her phone, and set an alarm. She gave him an unused sealant bottle to rest his stub on. He sat down and took another few sips of energon. She pulled over the dining room chair and sat before him, and crossed her arms upon the table, and rested her chin on them.

"You," he gave a little sound that might have been distantly related to a laugh, "look as tired as I suddenly feel."

"Yup," Sam agreed, and it wasn't even _noon_ yet. "I don't think I'm going to get my house ready in time. I'm going to have to prioritize the kitchen or we'll be living off the floor like barbarians."

"Everything about this is already barbaric."

She took a wistful breath and let it out in a sigh. She felt better than she'd expected to feel, considering she'd gone immediately from telling him to stay quiet to listening to him air his grievances. Maybe that was because he'd actually expressed real feelings. On a whim, she grabbed another cotton swab, and dipped it in the water and swirled it around. "Come here and give me your nose," she told him.

" _Excuse_ me?"

"You have soot all over your face, from whatever you did to your poor self to end up in this condition," she told him. "Come here."

"I'm not—! I did not do _anything_ to myself to—! Cease _mocking_ my _—!"_

"Starscream. Soot. On your face. It'll take me fifteen seconds."

He looked appalled, and kicked himself a pace back from her. "Stop _talking_ to me like that!"

"Like what?"

" _That_!"

Sam threw up her hands and tossed the cotton swab away in the same motion. What did it matter where it landed? She laid her head back down and set to ignoring him.

He didn't say anything to that, or even scoff at her. He was very quiet, which was suspicious for someone who liked to hear himself talk as much as Starscream did; and doubly so for someone who'd tracked her down on foot to vent on her just prior to this operation.

The minutes started ticking by, running down their seconds to zero on the surface of the phone. 

A scrape of metal against wood told her Starscream was on the move, but she didn't acknowledge him. He got up, and she listened as the click of his heels brought him up beside her face. He leaned his forearm against her forehead, and slipped to a seat with a little thud, back towards her. He was so close, she had to prop herself up to see him properly.

This was vaguely familiar.

This was sort of how a cat would 'apologize' to a person.

Wagering she at least understood his request for attention, Sam reached for another cotton swab. She dipped it in water, and pinched out the excess, and then carefully slipped one hand around Starscream so she wasn't accidentally pushing him over.

"Lift your chin?" she asked. 

He obeyed.

She craned over him, and carefully touched her thumb to the side of his head to hold him still. His wings twitched. She leaned her opposite pinky against the table to steady that hand and carefully touched the swab to his face. With ten times the gentleness she'd show a favorite figurine, she rubbed the swab back and forth across the bridge of his nose, just under his helmet crest, and in circles along his left cheek. His red optics lifted to her like sparkling rubies and, unlike a human who'd be shutting their eyes in a similar situation, he stared unwaveringly at her.

That stare suddenly began to _unnerve_ her for some reason, but she had to finish what she'd started, so she muscled the discomfort away.

Sam got the soot off him and leaned over a little further, to make sure he was clean. 

"There," she announced, releasing him slowly and flicking the cotton swab away. She no longer felt like teasing him. She felt ill, like she'd inappropriately treated him like some kind of living doll. So she said: "Sorry for mothering you and mistaking it for helping." 

Starscream didn't reply. He didn't look back at her. He also didn't get up, which left his wings and... really the entirety of himself rather close to her. She couldn't lay her head back down without touching him. She wondered if that was somehow the point, and, if so, whether she was supposed to do it or not.

The Wing Commander was right: There were a lot of things she honestly didn't know about him. And, right now? Sam was starting to notice a trend of long and cryptic silences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Negotiating 'normal.'


	16. Bird

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam's full name was chosen entirely at random and yet translates to "Listener & Protective Mama Bear." Ah, fortuna.
> 
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"You  like _touching_ me." 

Starscream had figured her out.  Sam looked away, pretending she hadn't heard him.

"It is because I am small. _Toy-sized._ You want to  play with  and  pose  me... like a _doll."_

"That is _not_ true," Sam asserted, glaring down at him (and how close he'd gone and sat himself to her).

"Isn't it?" His wings flicked, and below the smugness in his voice, there was this strange, sour tone. "Why else do you have so many of these 'children's toys,' as an adult? Instead of pictures or videos or any other less tactile medium?"

"I have _plenty_ of pictures and videos," Sam defended the thoroughly multi-media nature of her nerd-hood.

But Starscream wasn't letting it go: "You took every possible excuse to  clean  me," he derided with strangely grim or cruel way of saying it. "Like a _possession_ that's fallen in the mud."

"No." Sam wasn't even arguing that point. He laughed at her, but she persisted: "I keep trying to fuss over you like a  _child_ that's fallen in the mud, and  I'm _sorry,_ because I realize that's not much better."

Starscream didn't answer that immediately. He leaned back a few inches, and raised his only good hand to his mouth and chin. He thought about that answer. "Well that’s _ridiculous_ ," he at last dismissed.

"I know," Sam admitted, to an organism that was not only an adult, but also likely older than homo-sapien. She would have hung her head, _mea culpa,_ had Starscream not essentially been under it. "I keep acting like I found a baby bird on my doorstep." 

"A _what?_ " Starscream demanded, because of course he had no frame of reference for birds falling out of nest in springtime and waddling about haphazardly on the ground as they tried their wings out for the first time.

So Sam leaned over to her computer, flipped up the lid, tapped through her photo albums, and swiveled the laptop around to show him what a fledgling robin looked like.

"What the _pits_ is that?" He was not impressed.

"A bird?" she answered, confused by how an airplane could fail to recognize something so very elementary about the sky and its inhabitants.

Starscream frowned, looking between her and the screen. "That is what _birds_ look like to you, close up?"

"Yes...?"

"Never mind. And the sight of this... _disheveled_ _organism_ ," he rolled his wrist, "despite looking nothing whatsoever like you, still somehow mistakenly activates your instinct to... _nurture young_?"

"Humans are ridiculous," Sam agreed, scrolling up and down through her photographs.

"If _that_ is something you could confuse for an infant of your own species, It's a wonder no opportunistic parasite has yet latched hold of your species and tricked you into ensuring the survival of its progeny."

"I'm pretty much we would call those 'pets,' Starscream. Do Cybertronians not have pets?"

"Hnh." He did tilt his head, and his expression flattened out briefly. "I believe the expression is: _Touche_."

Oh she'd found all the pictures of all the mealworms!

Starscream had noticed. "Is that _you_ feeding it some kind of... of... ?" He audibly gagged, covering his mouth with the back of his hand and shuddering out to his wingtips.

"Couple years ago," she agreed, brightly.

"Well where is it now!?" he demanded, as if preemptively traumatized by the idea that he might be forced to witness entomophagy for himself.

She flashed him a smirk. "She flew away when she no longer needed me, of course. As all birds should."

He glanced over his shoulder at her again, brow arched. 

Sam shrugged, and stifled a yawn, and then tipped the laptop screen shut again. She might need a nap after this. "I can do _better_ than trying to mother a bazillion-year-old war machine like some kind of tiny bird, and you're allowed to hold me to that," she promised him, and then left it at that. And so did Starscream, for that matter. He seemed to be thinking his way around the idea that she found the size of him disarming. Perhaps he was deciding how much it offended him, or, better yet, perhaps he was brainstorming how to use it to his advantage.

Her phone timer elapsed and started beeping. The sealant primer was set. She reached over to dismiss the alarm, and then helped Starscream out by opening up the big tube of silicone for him.

Starscream picked up his tiny spatula, leaned forward, and then suddenly came up short. He looked at the silicone, and then at his arm. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait." He gave a small shake of his hand. "Do you have a mirror?"

Sam perked up, realizing he couldn't see what he was doing as well as he might like. "Bathroom, but it's attached to the wall."

He twisted to her and beckoned, "Hurry," but she still had the presence of mind to lay her hand flat and let him clamber onto her fingers and palm, rather than trying to grab him up around the waist. 

* * *

The mirror was _exactly_ what she should have put Starscream in front of so that he could have cleaned his own face. He glanced the size of it up and down—it was obviously comparatively larger than most mirrors he'd experienced—but when she lifted him to the mirror shelf and he caught sight of himself, he flinched.

"Do I really look that awful?" he croaked and reached hesitantly to touch the glass. What were the odds he'd meant to say that aloud? Maybe he'd forgotten present company. Quick! Distract him from self-deprecation on the basis of appearance:

"Silicone's drying," she helpfully reminded, even though it was just the tiniest blob, and he had an entire tube he could use, and he could never possibly waste all of it. 

"Right. Right," He looked away from himself, and back to the silicone blob she'd carried in upon a rolled up paper towel. Instead of applying it with his spatula, the way he had with the primer, he instead took his stub and passed it through the silicone to get as much of it inside the wound as possible. Then he pulled the stub free, and shoveled some off on his little spatula like it was grout, and focused on getting it inside any necessary cracks and crvasses.

"Any medic would give me hell for sealing a wound like this," Starscream assessed, glancing from arm to mirror as he packed the wound.

"Is that because it's dangerous?"

"It’s just obviously a hack job," he replied. He sounded half between a tired laugh and a determined mutter. "And a ridiculous overuse of materials."

Of course: He’d normally need a lot more sealant to plug up an entire arm if he was full sized. "Well, go ahead and be liberal; we've plenty of silicone, and probably want a nice, spongy protective barrier in there so you're cushioned from sudden falls in this ridiculously over-sized universe."

"'Spongy?'"

"'Elastic,'" she tried for a less organic word.

"Hnh. Agreed." He took some time, and his reflection, to get the stub sealed up just the way he wanted it. Then he looked about himself. "I need something to quickly buff off the excess before it dries."

She tore him free a tiny square of the paper towel and passed it to him, forgiving his lack of resourcefulness because these were materials with which he'd never previously worked, and were as alien as energon was to her. He was a fast learner: When he wanted a second piece of paper towel, he tore it free by himself. 

She stifled another yawn, and leaned on the sink and stretched her legs one at a time, waiting to see if he'd need anything else. He did not. He leaned back on his palm, and kept his stub raised above his head so gravity would help it settle properly. He took in a deep ventilation, and let it out. The mirror held his interest for a minute longer, and then he glanced over his shoulder at her. He had an expression that said he was dead on his feet.

Sam smiled, flat and thin. "I think we need a mid morning nap," she admitted.

"Preferably in the sunlight," Starscream agreed. "Seeing as it is the only thing your horrible planet has going for it."

* * *

"How's your balance while unconscious?" Sam asked, as she maneuvered past cardboard boxes and into the living room, heading towards the window. "Do you roll around a lot?"

"Nothing that flies, climbs, or otherwise treats with the world on a vertical axis, should roll around _at all_ while in recharge," Starscream retorted like it was a god-given fact.

"Great, that's much better than humans." Her couch was buried in cardboard boxes, and not in the position she wanted it, so she temporarily sat Starscream down on the window ledge. "Do you see that long plastic rod dangling on the left hand side of the blinds?"

"What? Oh. I suppose."

"Rotate that clockwise or... counter clockwise if that doesn't work. It'll let the sun in." She didn't look to see whether he complied, mostly because she just needed him out of the way so she could move boxes from one stack to another, and she didn't want to end up balancing on one foot trying to surmount a pile of pots and pans and accidentally fall with him in hand.

She heard the soft sounds of plastic and string, and then sunlight was pouring into the room. Starscream's mission was accomplished, and hers wasn't far off. Sam stooped to get her hands under the couch, hefted with her knees, and pullllllllled. She dragged the couch in her wake, getting it's seat back up under the window. There. 

Sam laid a bath towel over the back of the couch, and Starscream understood that this signified a makeshift bed, intended for him, and he climbed up onto it. She gently flipped one of the corners up over him in case he wanted to use it a bit like a blanket; he irritably kicked it away to indicate he did not. Then she turned herself about and flopped into the sofa, kicked up her feet, and draped an arm over her eyes. 

Apart from the 'blinding her' part, the sunlight did feel pretty good. She turned her face into the seat back, where the cast shadow covered her eyes. Much better. 

"Don't wake me up unless it’s the apocalypse," Sam requested. _Especially_ because waking up meant hard work, and a shrinking time frame on which to build herself an entire kitchen. 

All that was visible of Starscream by that point was the tip of one wing, which flicked either dismissively or in acknowledgement of the request.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Sam dreamed about finding out that tiny live transformers were multiplying every time she turned around, such that an utterly implausible number of them were overrunning her house and building miniature bases and forming religions and complaining at her about resource shortages and the lack of a properly outfitted medbay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What are the odds that if you toss Knockout through the cupboard, he'll conveniently just have a them-sized buffer tool and a tin of jet polish in his subspace? 
> 
> Just asking.


	17. Computer

Sam woke up to ruby red eyes and otherwise hooded features leering ominously down at her.

Starscream had to be doing this for effect; the energon cube in his hand was damning evidence he'd gotten down, walked all the way to the bedroom, gotten himself an afternoon snack, turned around, and climbed all the way back up on the couch to perch himself in a position of vertical superiority.

Maybe he really _was_ secretly a cat.

"Good, you're awake," he said, and there was a dangerous note in his voice, warning Sam's self preservation instincts that she had better stop daydreaming about Catscream. "I have some questions, to which I expect candid and straightforward answers."

"Uh oh," Sam yawned. "What did I do?"

"I'm not sure," Starscream intoned in a way that suggested he might be willing to show mercy. "Perhaps you can _explain_ to me why, despite owning the appropriate figurines, it didn't occur to you to bring a _medic_ through the allegedly 'magical cupboard' when deciding how best to treat my injuries?"

Alright, so he'd been rummaging through her boxes, too. How long had she slept? 

"Well?" Starscream prompted, getting steadily less merciful.

"Two reasons," Sam groggily held up her fingers and rubbed sleep from her face. "First one is that the cupboard doesn't work in reverse. I'm on team 'save the humans' by default, so I can't in good conscious steal an Autobot Chief Medical Officer when the whole faction would probably fall apart without him. Possibly literally."

Starscream scowled but didn't say anything to that one.

"And the second reason is: Ratchet doesn't like you, and isn't likely to help you, and he's stubborn, and it's not like I've got any way of forcing his compliance. He'd force me into some kind of deal that benefitted him. He'd at least make me promise to drop everything and work out how to fix the cupboard before he agreed to help, and I'd end up either losing all my clients and/or living off my bathroom floor for the next year."

"Are you _seriously,"_ Starscream's voice rose shrill and angry, "telling me that my _survival_ ranks lower on your list of priorities than your simple _convenience_!?"

"No of course not," Sam scolded him, "I'd have never made it to the point where you were literally _dying in front of me_ without pitching him through the cupboard and making up some ridiculous threat I could never possibly carry out to get him to fix you. Are you kidding? I was halfway to that point when we accidentally melted some of the wax out of your arm, repeatedly telling myself, 'No Sam, you can't do that Sam, stealing people from other dimensions is _irresponsible,_ Sam.' "

"You _would_ be just the sort of defective organism to have an 'inner voice,'" he snarled as if utterly disgusted by her.

"As opposed to having what? An especially loud 'outer voice,' and monologuing all my thoughts where other people can overhear them?"

Starscream didn't immediately answer. Red eyes squinted at her, and his chin lifted. "I don't believe I know what you are implying," he said with quiet haughtiness, nose upturned. 

_"You know exactly what I am implying, he-whose-name-ends-in-'Scream.' "_

"Are you suggesting that I—"

"Am I suggesting that you are _loud?_ No! Of _course_ not. Given to accidentally voicing your innermost thoughts out loud? Perish the thought, _clearly_ you never. Have been walked in on by Soundwave while giggling maniacally about Megatron's imminent demise an extremely—"

"I am _deliberately_ insulting you right now, not attempting to conceal a coup!" He threw his hands in the air. "Of course I can think internally! That doesn't mean I refer to myself in the third person or talk to myself like a mech of unsound processor!"

"Well, you should try it sometime, you're really missing out."

Starscream lifted his hands up and put them on his hips. Well, one of his hands, but the bum arm mirrored the working one. He stared at her: A scolding, thin-lipped, 'this - is - _serious_ ' stare; like a teacher at the end of ninth period Chemistry trying to decide if she deserved a Saturday detention or an outright school suspension, or maybe— _just_ _maybe,_ if the anger wouldn't linger—an indulgent smirk and a shake of the head. 

"Starscream, I'd absolutely risk getting hospitalized by a miniaturized raging medic to save your life," Sam promised him with a double thumbs up. "But while we're working out everything else, I think it makes sense to try and get my hands on a secondhand Knockout, seeing as we'll probably get a better reaction from him than we would Ratchet."

He exhaled through all his vents, sat back on his haunches, and eventually rubbed his chin. "Mn. Practical. Knockout would certainly be much easier to intimidate. _The coward._ "

"I was actually thinking more along the line that Knockout would _like_ you more, but okay, I guess your evaluation system works, too."

" _Like_ me?" Starscream grinned back down at he with a chuckle. "As I said, you don't _remotely_ know anything about anything."

" 'He probably likes you better than Ratchet does,' there, how about that?"

Starscream inclined his head to acknowledge this was true, but apparently that had more to do with Ratchet's affection than Knockout's: "He also has more of a reason to _kill_ me, or plant some form of tracker on me, to deliver me on a silver platter to Megatron on my return to the dimension."

"Ooh, Decepticons sound awesome," Sam chirped, swinging her legs off the couch and sitting up, "you should put that on your next recruitment poster. 'We will opportunistically kill you the instant you fall out of your boss's favor, sign up now!'"

"Pfeh," Starscream flicked a wrist. "You have no ambitions, and have clearly never suffered anything; it is pointless explaining _anything_ to you. 

"Probably true. Feel better that I didn't maliciously deny you proper medical care?" she prodded.

He scowled. 

"I rarely forget the original topic," she told him sweetly, in case he hadn't figured it out yet. "Diversions be damned. Helps me out at my job."

"Your job," he mocked. "Yes, what _is_ your job, exactly?"

Sam perked up and then held a hand out to him. "I'll show you."

* * *

"I’m a freelancer," Samantha explained as she sat down at the dining room table and tipped up her laptop lid.

"That is not a job, that is a _monetization strategy,_ " Starscream said as he stepped out onto the table beside it.

"I'm a _draftsman,_ " Sam elaborated, bringing up AutoCAD and some related project management software. "I receive orders from companies or individuals that need to make themselves a certain kind of physical part. The part could be metal, plastic, wood; you name it; it could be for a swing set, or an engine, or a toy, or a water bottle, or a refrigerator; basically anything. I get a bunch of engineering specs or draw them up myself, and then I use a three dimensional modeling program to design the part. Then I give the client the finalized plans, and they use those plans to make the part they need."

Starscream frowned. "And this job can not be more effectively done by some kind of algorithm?"

She laughed. "Maybe one day. Not yet. Our brains are still better at adapting to a million and one randomized odd jobs than our algorithms are."

"Oh it's that sort of thing," Starscream thought aloud. "So, people hire you when either they've no in-house engineer or their own are busy, is that it?"

"Ayup. And I get hired for a lot of small orders. A lot of times people want to 3D Print a very small production run of prototypes or collectibles or gifts of some kind."

"Hmm." Starscream mused upon this a healthy minute, only to glance her way with a gleam in his eye. "Collectibles like _figurines?"_

Sam hadn't expected him to infer that so quickly. "Sometimes," she allowed. "I try to pass my name around in the fan communities. A lot of people like modifying existing toys to be more show-accurate or comics-accurate, or sometimes their favorite niche character never got a toy at all, and they want to modify an existing one to look like them. Other times they want to fix existing figurines that got roughed up and lost a part."

"Mn. But you don't own any '3D Printing' apparatus yourself?"

"I do not." Sam reflected. "Although frankly, now that you're here, I might want to get in contact with someone who can do small rush jobs for me."

"That seems prudent."

"Of course, if you want me to shell out money for nice things for you—"

"—I should probably avoid slicing open your dentae with my landing gear again."

Aww, see that, they were already learning! "Not maiming me would be a good start," she confirmed. "Here, just in case you were wondering, although I’ve no idea why you would, these are the plans I'm using for the house." She exited out of AutoCAD and began bringing up her rushed house plans, including raw material estimations, time budgets, and art boards.

"You've done this kind of thing before?" Starscream asked.

"Not on my own. Helped out a few friends' families, cousins, and my step-mom once. But I've got enough basic skills to either do it or pick it up from an online tutorial."

"And what exactly will _I_ be doing while you are working on this... project?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "Why, do you need little old me to entertain you?"

He scowled at her. "You said that we would discuss the multimedia franchise depicting my species. 'Transformers,' you called it."

Sam thought about that. "Any idea where you'd like to start?" she asked. "Because, like I've said, there have been a lot of reboots and niche depictions of this franchise, in multiple and often serial media forms, all with different authors. They can't all be true because basic universal facts between them are different. Maybe they depict different dimensions, and therefore different versions of you?"

"Hnh. Well, apparently I am stuck here and disabled while you are engaged in menial construction labors."

"From your point of view I guess it does look that way," Sam was forced to agree, because right now she really did need to get some 'menial construction labor' behind her and install kitchen cabinets and get her house closer to its end point. If she didn't start making progress in that job soon, she'd start to panic about 'getting nothing done.' Fixing the house's only magical cupboard could wait. She had to put some anxiety to rest first.

"Then I might as well review all of it," Starscream announced, "starting from the beginning, so that I can discern for myself what is applicable and what is not. After all, my primary concern is with whatever information you _think_ you know about me, and whatever notions have been put in your mind by these made-for-children cartoons. And if you say that my 'character' has been around for awhile, then clearly 'my' dimension is not the only one that's influenced what you think of me."

Samantha had been halfway into asking herself where she'd stored her blue rays of Transformers: Prime, and instead had to mentally derail to parse Starscream's alternative view of the situation.

Sam gulped.

" _All_ of it?" she asked, with mounting trepidation.

"Yes. Why? How many cartoons can one species possibly make?"

A lot actually, but that wasn't what was tripping up Sam: "From the _beginning_?"

"Yes, I just said that! What's the matter with you? Are your audials going bad, or are you hiding something?"

Sam sat back in her chair for a long moment. "It's just that Generation One Transformers came out in the eighties and nineties, and was _extremely_ badly written," she confessed on behalf of the poor human race. "It was pretty much the dawn of sci-fi cartoons. At the time it was revolutionary; now it's just _silly_."

"Did it depict a 'Starscream' or not?" demanded Starscream.

"I mean... Yes, it did. But his character basically consists of declaring himself leader of the Decepticons if Megatron so much as sneezes."

Starscream raised a brow.

"Well," Sam leaned forward and start clicking through folders on her computer. "You asked for the beginning, so... uh, I guess here it goes." She found the bootlegged list of episodes she wanted, clicked the first one, and turned the whole computer towards Starscream. "Just, uh, fair warning: The Autobots are the protagonists, none of it really makes any sense, and I will not be responsible if you decide half way through to lose all faith in humanity, or that you no longer want to see any of the much better written universes that followed—or any _other_ cartoon for that matter, or anything ever produced by humans, ever again."

"I never had any faith in humanity to begin with," admonished Starscream, who settled himself down to watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: "Lord Megatron has Fallen! It would appear that I, Starscream, am now leader of the Decepticons!"  
> M: "You couldn't lead ant droids to a picnic!"
> 
> Starscream pauses, tabs to Google, types 'define: picnic. Common expressions, colloquialisms,' hits enter.  
> Also Starscream muttering to himself about the seekers. "Of *course* they would keep coloring us wrong."


	18. Juvenile Fun

Sam was braced for a wide variety of different reactions from Starscream, none of which actually came to pass. The absolute last things she'd ever expected of the whole scenario were four hours of relative silence only for him to suddenly bust out laughing hysterically. He was two rooms away but his cackling filled the whole house, wall to wall.

Puzzled, and honestly a little curious about how the morning's cartoon binge had gone, Sam set down her tools, wiped off her face, and crept across the household to get a peek at him. 

He was clutching his chest, covering his face, and laughing long, loud, high, and hard, like an absolute crazy person. Which, to be fair, he probably was. Paused in full-screen mode was a scene of Optimus and Megatron punching each other in the face like proper robots. Sam couldn't place the exact episode, but had a feeling Starscream might have started jumping around and watching them out of order. 

"Starscream?" she asked.

He was laughing so hard he couldn't summon up the air to talk. He flapped a wrist at her, like he was telling her to wait there for him to compose himself. She leaned in the threshold with a bemused expression growing on her face. At least he wasn't _angry._

"I-" he wheezed, a big grin on his face. "I-I _get_ it now. It's not _remotely_ about the narrative. I-It's just stupid, silly, violent, juvenile _fun_." He wiped fluid from his optics. Man, look at that mirth! She'd never expected him to enjoy this so much.

"That's a pretty all-around accurate description of the depth of Generation One lore, right there," Sam snickered. "At least up until the first movie, which ruined everyone's childhood."

"There's a _movie_?" he demanded, lighting up. "About _what_? What possible plot could fill up a longer quotient of time than these throw-away contrivances the show's producers presume to call 'episodes?'"

"I actually forget; something about Unicron, I think, and the end of the world. I just remember they kill off everyone's favorite characters, including Starscream."

His wings flew up, sharp and pointy. "The writers deactivated _me!?_ You said I was a main character!"

"Yeah, at your own coronation, even, with a fancy crown and everything!"

"At—my— _What!?_ "

"And it's not even a good death. There's no struggle, or any epic battle, or even any pleading for mercy. It's just one shot. Bam: Dead. That's how _everyone_ dies in that movie.Two million years of war, or whatever, and half the Autobot main cast dies because Megatron somehow gets behind them on the command deck of their ship and shoots everyone while they're–"

"Yes yes yes, whatever! Get back to the subject: What do you mean there was a 'crown!?' "

"Uh, it's a crown, Starscream. What more is there to say?"

"What _sort_ of crown!?"

"Gold, I guess? With a red gem? Though it's not like the coronation had a huge audience. Your character throws Megatron out of an airlock a little before that, because the show writers don't seem to understand how space travel works in zero gravity and Astrotrain claims he's 'too heavy' to keep flying. For some reason, nobody intervenes or even is remotely upset about this. Then a couple minutes later Starscream goes on to crown himself Lord of the Decepticons, only to get interrupted and laser-beamed into oblivion."

" 'Laser-beam' is not a verb in your language," Starscream snarled, before muttering very crossly: "Was it Megatron?"

"Yeah, basically."

"Of _course_ it's Megatron."

"And the only indication the movie gives that it's aware it's killing off a fan-favorite is the loving detail with which the animators rendered Starscream _turning into graphite and disintegrating._ "

"Can't even keep his nose out of my _coronation._ "

Samantha snickered.

Starscream shot her a death glare!

She lifted up her hands and stepped back to say she didn't want to fight with him. "I just think you're getting a little excited about a completely ridiculous juvenile cartoon version of yourself, and his silly and unimpressive coronation. It's not like Cybertron was rebuilt or there were teaming crowds of adoring fans."

She paused for effect, and to give him a moment to sulk, before pivoting:

"For that, we'd have to switch over to IDW Starscream."

Little wings popped up again. "To what-now?"

"But that would be skipping ahead," Sam's voice breezed airily over his. "Can't go ruining all the fun twists and surprises all at once."

Starscream glowered with frightening intensity in her direction and said, in a low and serious voice, "You will _immediately_ tell me what you were referring to."

"Oh I'm sure you'll find it eventually," she grinned simultaneously, nonchalant, "you've got all the media files on that computer, and I'm not hiding anything. Didn't you want to review _everything_?"

The Decepticon Second In Command shot her computer a concerned look, as if for the first time appreciating just how large a human-made media franchise could grow over a few short years, and how much of that franchise might be ridiculous gobblygook cluttering up the path to anything genuinely informative or exciting. _Spoiler alert, Starscream, the answer is: A lot._

Sam hummed to herself. "That reminds me, I'm going to have to find alternative pin-up posters."

Starscream didn't have time for her and her obscure references to random human things like wall decorations, which might or might not actually end up being important; he was much too busy calculating exactly how many years it would take him to manually review thirty-five years of humans putting Cybertronians in everything from cartoons, to anime, to movies, to live action movies, to books, to comic books, to toys, to video games, to board games, to– well, he got the idea. Sam decided to take pity on him, and walked up over to the table to lean and toggle the player out of full screen mode so she could see the playlist. He'd randomized it, for some reason. She wasn't sure if he'd be particularly interested in _any_ of the early G1 episodes, but maybe if she glanced up and down the list, something would jump out at her and–

"Don't watch that!" Sam blurted, on seeing the next file was labeled 'Episode 4.'

Starscream spun about to glare at her outburst in surprise, before narrowing his optics suspiciously. "Oh? And why not? I _did_ say I wanted to review _everything_."

"It's–" Generation One hadn't been released in chronological order, for reasons that presently escaped Sam, and she couldn't remember which order her own files had been organized in, or whether _Fire in the Sky_ would be labeled episode ten or episode four or if she was remembering the wrong episode numbers all-together. But, then again, what did it matter? By _Fire on the Mountain_ they'd be revisiting the same plot points and key characters. There was no point hiding any of it from him; he might have even already seen it.

While she deliberated over what to tell him, Starscream swung himself to his feet, strutted gracefully onto the laptop, and stamped upon the keyboard. He must have known the hotkey for jumping to the next movie in the playlist, because Episode 4 began to play. He put a hand on his hip and turned his nose defiantly up to her. 

Sam rubbed awkwardly at the back of her head. "It's not like that," she said. "I'm sorry, it's probably nothing."

" _What's_ probably nothing?"

She wasn't sure where to start explaining. "The toy that turned into you," she tried, "was from one of the first television shows where the animators started using three-dimensional models instead of two-dimensional drawings. It was called 'Transformers Prime.'" (Starscream grimaced at the name. Why? Possibly because it included the word 'Prime'?) "Since the 3D technology was still relatively young, and each additional robot they had to animate was prohibitively expensive, the show ended up having a very, _very_ small cast of characters. Each faction had just four or five named Cybertronians, and the vast majority of the Decepticons were just faceless nameless goons called 'Vehicons.'"

"What does this have to do with anything?" Starscream was getting annoyed. 

"Well the character about to be introduced in this G1 Episode," Sam waved at the screen because by now she could definitely tell it was _Fire in the Sky,_ "doesn't even exist in Transformers Prime. But then again, _most characters_ don't exist in Transformers Prime. So what should I take that to mean about your universe? I'm having a chicken or an egg problem here. Did you end up plucked from a universe where the Cybertronian population is tragically tiny _as a result of_ the fact that animators of Transformers Prime could only render so many characters? Or should I assume all the same basic characters from G1 still exist in your universe, and that Transformers Prime is just telling stories from your universe with an abridged cast owed to animation limitations?"

"Let me get this straight," Starscream crossed his arms (as best he could) with an annoyed and sassy tone that clearly said he thought Sam was incredibly stupid. "You are presently stumbling over yourself to explain something because you are wondering whether your little human cartoons are _faithful adaptations_ of a given universe?" He stared at her pointedly, glanced at the screen, and then stared back at her again. "Are you telling me you honestly, for even one moment, considered that 'Generation One' could possibly represent a valid universe?"

"Well..." Sam dragged out.

Starscream looked positively appalled.

"Maybe a really _goofy_ universe?"

"A goofy-? Hang the implausibility of any of that universe's social constructs!" Starscream shouted, throwing his arms in the air. "The whole thing doesn't even have consistent laws of physics! Have you seen how frequently I and other seekers randomly change places owed to the animator's inane inability to keep color schemes straight!? Half the time the characters leap into the air and just start flying! The other half, they walk! A universe that exhibited such wildly fluctuating laws of physics would implode upon itself long before it could ever possibly develop intelligent life!"

Sam hung her head. "You're probably right."

"Of course I'm right!" he exclaimed, but then threw his nose in the air again, turned dramatically, crossed his arms, and looked very puffed up and confident with himself. "Now that that's settled: Presume animation limitations. The Cybertronian population has absolutely _not_ been reduced to miserly 'fours and fives.' "

She leaned back on her heels and bridged her fingers, and tactfully broached the topic with: "How exactly do you feel about a person named 'Jetfire' and/or 'Skyfire'?"

His wings dropped, his red eyes flew open, and he uncrossed his arms and turned back to her with a spooked expression upon his face. " _Who?_ " he breathed, even though it was clear he'd heard her correctly the first time. 

"He's about to show up in this episode," Sam gestured to the computer. "And it doesn't go incredibly well, particularly for Starscream."

Starscream spun to look at the computer. "Skyfire is _dead,_ " he spat. 

"Not in G1 he isn't," Sam responded. "He's buried somewhere in the ice below the Artic Circle."

"On _Earth!?_ " Starscream hissed disbelievingly. 

"In G1, yes."

"That's- That's not possible. It isn't! I'd _know,_ I was there, I know what classification of planet he deactivated on!"

"I never insinuated otherwise." Sam backed off. "Like you said earlier, I don't really know anything about you, and this show's narrative is stupid. But I do know this episode has some of the _only_ background story G1 Starscream ever gets. It's some of the only background story _anyone_ ever gets. And it doesn't go well, it's never expanded on, and the characters later interact without ever-" 

"Shut up! Shut _up!_ " He was rewinding back to the beginning of the episode, and crouching down to sit upon the laptop. He was wearing a very grave expression. "I need to watch."

Sam might have bowed out then to give him space, but she was pretty sure she remembered G1 Starscream _shooting_ G1 Jetfire, and maybe it was best she didn't leave him alone to watch something like that in a medium as blunt and irreverent as a children's cartoon. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The original "Fire in the Sky" is copyrighted, though you can find it split up into parts on Youtube. Or! Instead! You could read [ this hilarious comic by herzspalter ](https://herzspalter.tumblr.com/post/140352189555/fire-in-the-sky-episode-7-of-the-transformers) whom I follow on tumblr who has done [a number of 'recap' comics of G1 episodes](https://herzspalter.tumblr.com/G1-recap) that are hilarious because they underscore how little sense everything meant.


	19. Sad

"Are you familiar with the basic principles of how _lift_ is generated?"

This... was the first time Starscream had spoken in over twenty-four hours, so Sam set down her tools, pulled off her safety goggles, and gave him the full of her attention. "Yeah," she answered. "Are we talking Bernoulli's Principle?"

"I'm unfamiliar with your Earth scientists," he said with a remarkable lack of sass. 

So Sam quickly described it: "An increase in the speed of air decreases its static pressure. Likewise, if you build an object that's curved on top and flat on the bottom, such as a wing, and cut through the air really fast with it, air will pass over the top of the wing faster than it passes over the bottom, meaning the pressure on the bottom of the wing will be more than the pressure on the top of the wing. So the wing and whatever it's connected to will go up."

Starscream nodded, satisfied. "Skyfire was an interplanetary shuttle rated for deep space travel. Something like a little _cold_ wouldn't have slowed him down, much less deactivated him.

"He could generate enough ventral thrust to take off or land on virtually any type of terrain. His armor weathered meteor showers, raging magnetic storms, complete fluid immersion on planets with natural lakes of liquid nitrogen, and, conversely, temperatures and pressures that would melt me or squash me into rubbish. And his engines... Well, it wasn't a thing like mine. It wasn't for _endurance,_ either. It was meant for singular, immense acts of strength: Namely, breaking free of planetary gravity without the assistance of auxiliary rockets or thrusters.

"He could launch from ground level, on a planet with ten times Cybertron's gravity, filled to the brim with cargo that out-massed him, and still successfully reach orbit. He was, to put a singular word to him: _Robust._ "

Sam supposed: "The sort of mechanism who could laugh in the face of what Earthlings called 'bad weather.'" 

"Precisely," Starscream confirmed, sounding glad she understood. "But there is one hazard to planetary weather that _every_ flight frame has to contend with. And that... is _ice_."

"I'll assume we're not just talking about water...?"

" _Any_ ice. Water, ammonia, hydrocarbons, anything that gives a planet it's equivalent of a 'water cycle,' with evaporation, precipitation, solidification, melting points, clouds, _storms._ If the air is filled with something that can potentially solidify, then it can produce _ice._ And if you aren't careful, that ice can build up, and up, and up..."

"But you said Skyfire could carry many times his own mass..."

"I did. He had an extremely powerful engine."

Sam circled back to the original conversational starter, the first words Starscream had spoken all day: _Are you familiar with the principals of lift?_

"Anything which builds up on a wing," Sam realized, "can change the _shape_ of the wing."

Starscream nodded. "Once the shape of the wing is lost, there's no lift. If there's no lift, there might as well be no wings. No stabilization. No steering. Imagine one of your passenger aircraft with the wings torn off, flying on thrust alone, like a rocket instead of like a plane."

"And he had a good engine and a means of thrust vectoring, so he tried to compensate, but..."

" _But,_ " Starscream agreed, and then said no more. Sam filled in the blanks. 

Skyfire, with his powerful engine and impenetrable armor, had been rendered helpless in the accumulation of a hammering ice storm. It sounded like he'd been equipped with a gimballing engine, or something similar, so likely he'd _tried_ to use that to break cloud cover like any other rocket. Instead, he'd ended up turned against his flight path and failed to gain altitude, with more and more ice adding more and more drag, until finally he simply didn't have the power left to stay airborne.

"Could he have tried to land?" she asked. "Once it became clear he wasn't going to reach the appropriate escape velocity? You must have been trying to escape a potentially lethal storm, but when he realized it wasn't going to make it, could he have headed down and used what energy he had left to try and slow down, crash land, and wait out the storm?

"Don't you think that's the very _first_ thing I checked?" Starscream snapped, showing anger for the first time since starting the conversation. "It didn't die down for metacycles. When it did, I looked. I _looked._ "

Sam decide not to mention how American rocket ships tended to end up plummeting into the Indian Ocean, half a world away, if anything went wrong while they were taking off. Planets were big things to search all on one's own, and if anything had been wrong with Skyfire's comms...

Instead, she remembered: "You said he didn't die on a classification of planet that matched Earth, though."

Starscream's face did this complicated thing where it looked grim, tired, sour, and almost _guilty._ "No," he confirmed. "But when I finally managed to dredge those reconnaissance maps up from my archives, I realized that we _had_ surveyed Earth not long beforehand. The naming and encoding system used on the Nemesis's maps was devised by the Vosnian Academy of Sciences; the system Skyfire and I had been drafting our maps in at the time of his deactivation came out of Iacon. Otherwise, I might have recognized it earlier."

That made sense. One man's 'Germany' was another man's "Deutschland;" one person's "HR-2061," was another person's "Betelgeuse." You couldn't be expected to recognize every single name a location had ever been given, even a location you associated with such painful memories. And, presumably, Starscream hadn't been in the area for thousands (if not millions?) of years; he'd seen so many solar systems in between that they'd all blurred together. It wasn't like Sol was particularly _unique_ as far as star systems went.

"Was this on one of our smaller gas giants?" Sam wondered. "Or the," what were they called again, "ice giants, I guess?" Neptune and Uranus apparently had liquid surfaces. Humans didn't know enough about Pluto for Sam to suppose whether it had weather, or not. She also didn't know whether transformers would refer to objects of Pluto's size as 'planets,' deserving of 'planetary classifications.' 

Starscream didn't answer her one way or another. He'd turned away and his wings were stiff and low. He looked like he'd said his piece and now felt raw and open; he looked like he wanted to be left alone.

"Would..." Sam hesitated, because Starscream had refused to speak to her all yesterday evening, and paced through the night with a glower so murderous it had convinced even _her_ to keep her distance. "Would you like me to pour you a bath?"

He looked across his shoulder at her, expression inscrutable a moment before twisting into a sneer. "What, am I _dirty_ again?" he spat savagely. 

"No," Sam replied, and then didn't clarify.

Starscream fell silent, expression melting back into tiredness. Then, without speaking, he gave a little nod of his head. 

She used a small casserole dish this time, and made sure there was a sinful level of foam on top. 

* * *

The kitchen had cabinets and countertops. The sink was installed. A set of major appliances including an oven and a proper refrigerator were on their way from the local warehouse.

The bar stools for the kitchen islet would be arriving tomorrow. The floor had been lain with slate pavers and properly grouted, pavers which led out the hallway, snaked into the bathroom and laundry room, and headed out the front door. There was a box spring in her bedroom now, and all the old carpet had been torn out, and she had found a good four-poster frame on Facebook market which was getting delivered to her on the weekend. A package from Amazon had arrived, containing the steamer she'd need to remove all that horrible curling yellow wallpaper tomorrow. In a normal timestream, this would have been worthy of a hearty pack on the back and warm, proud, satisfied feeling in one's gut. Which Sam actually _did_ feel! Half the time.

She'd be in the zone, working, sealing down granite countertops and drilling holes; she wipe her brow, sit back, and admire a job well done–! And then suddenly she'd _remember_ , and be hit by a queasy, floaty, anxious sensation, because _time had passed_ and yet there was a miniaturized person moping and brooding around her house somewhere whom she hadn't checked in on, and whom she was _responsible_ for, and that surely must mean she was _neglecting_ him.

Two incompatible worlds were fighting over her emotional rhythms: The mundane real world where houses had to be furnished and bills had to be paid, and a magical world where tiny fictional characters could come to life and require medical attention. Almost by definition, if she was succeeding at paying attention to one, she was neglecting the other. Right?

Not that she had any idea what to do for Starscream, or even where to _find_ him half the time. He appeared to be operating on his own mysterious schedule unrelated to the time of day. Occasionally he did return to peruse her laptop, which she knew because she'd suddenly hear another Transformers G1 episode playing in the other room. But seldom did he finish an episode before hitting the pause button and disappearing. That almost suggested he was _agitated,_ but every time she caught sight of him, he was usually fast asleep, curled up on a high ledge somewhere, with only his wings visible. (Sam reasoned he must have approved of the kitchen cabinets, if only because he'd ended up on top of them just hours after their installation.)

Based on the heights he was reaching, his lack of arm, and the unfortunate dearth of tiny ladders, Sam reasoned Starscream must have been starting to use his thrusters to aid him in controlled ascents and descents, even if he couldn't really _fly_ the way he could in alt-mode. She could have tried listening for the tiny sound of miniature jet engines spinning up to stay apprised of his motions, but it was frankly impossible to listen for _him_ when she was the one using power tools all day long. He didn't seem to associate the bedroom with 'sleeping,' and never made an attempt to lay down for the night when she did. For three nights in a row, he'd been missing when she'd headed off to bed, and so she'd said an awkward sort of "Heading to bed now, goodnight?" to the whole house, and received no response.

Apart from the brief discussion about lift , and the bath he'd taken in her casserole dish afterwards, Starscream generally appeared to be _avoiding_ her. 

So, yeah. She was getting a lot work done, owed to the lack of distractions. But she also _seriously_ felt like she was neglecting a bigger, more important, more surreal, and honestly much more interesting issue: Her possibly-depressed miniaturized sci-fi villain roommate. 

But what could she do? Start lecturing the walls, and demand he come out to talk to her? Sneak up on him? Camp one of his naptime locations until he simply had to wake up and face her? She _could_ put aside the housework and focus on her clients right now, and that would at least allow her to listen for the tiny whine of mini jet engines, but that didn't give her a script for what she'd say once she finally found him. No, confrontation was not the way to do this. Not at all.

Much better to choose _bribery._ Bribery might get her some results. 

Samantha opened up her laptop spent some time sourcing blue plastic and rubber cubes with 'Transformers' or 'Energon' in the description material, and eventually tabbed to Amazon.com, bridged her fingers, and squinted at the search bar. Nothing in her 'Recommended for You' category seemed likely to work; Sam needed a _gift idea,_ and so far some of the most compelling interactions she'd had with Starscream had involved personal attention and grooming, which sort of suggested she should get him some type of beauty product.

So what were her options?

Metal polish, obviously, but Sam wasn't banking on that winning him over. Cybertronians probably had as many types of metal polish as humans had types of hair shampoo and face moisturizer all put together, and frankly that was just a _staggering amount_ of variety in beauty products, right there, whose exact qualities human chemistry was unlikely to be able to compete with. She'd do her research, and try to buy something appropriate, but Starscream was a jet, and also a Cybertronian, and worst of all she didn't have his input, so odds were he would be turning up his nose to whatever it was she picked. That made it less than an ideal choice of icebreaker.

What else?

In Transformers: Prime, Knockout had made it fairly clear that Cybertronians could buff themselves with them-sized rotary tools. But even a human-sized rotary tool was still explicitly sized to buff an _automobile_ to a shiny finish, which made them way, way, _way_ too big for grooming something Starscream's size. (Sam had gone into the garage to double-check hers, just to be sure. _Massive._ Even with a big floofy buffer pad on it, it would probably look and sound just as terrifying as a rotary saw.) Starscream's arms were as wide across as one of her _nails_. Even if he were willing to lean himself into a buffer tool, Samantha greatly doubted doing so would be an enjoyable or relaxing experience. (And while she doubted such a buffing pad would seriously maim him, she did imagine one wrong twitch could prove as painful as jamming your hand into a ceiling fan.)

Her nails...

Hrm.

What... what did _nail salons_ use for manicures? That was an idea! Nail salon tools might not be _ideal_ for grooming Cybertronians, but they surely couldn't _hurt him,_ right? Not when they were meant to be used on something as soft as human nails. 

Since she didn't know what the relevant utensils were called, Samantha searched for an 'automatic nail tool' and clicked on the first entry titled 'manicure pen' that came up on screen. It was exorbitantly overpriced and looked cheaply made, as was appropriate for a beauty product. She squinted at it, and tilted her head sideways, and then nearly smacked herself upside the head in realization.

Dremel Tools. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case, you know, you didn't know what kind of tools the Dremel company specializes in, you can [ find relevant videos about them on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOT_Q9Xzha0&ab_channel=CorneliusCreations)


	20. Exfoliate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Being a writer means needing to research [expert opinions](https://www.6mmbr.com/corrosiontest.html#:~:text=Bottom%20Line%2D%2DEezox%20and,fade%20after%20repeated%20extreme%20exposure) on [highly specific aspects](https://www.amazon.com/Mil-Comm-Premium-1-5-Ounce-Synthetic-Lubricant/dp/B002T1ZW2E) of an eclectic mix-up of different topics- after which you [still have to make up half of everything anyway](https://forums.sassnet.com/index.php?/topic/183072-murphys-mix/) and hope you get proven right later.

It was a brisk morning in late fall, and the sunlight was streaming boldly through the kitchen and dining room windows.

A pitcher of hot water stood partially illuminated in the beams steam wafting off the surface, rolling over the nearby stack of remaining energon cubes. Fully bathed in the sunlight was an ornate china soup bowl that had been salvaged from the old house owner's collection, positioned on top of a white doily and looking positively seductive in its delicate pinks and greens.

A can of Eezox CLP+ Gun Care Solution was perched artfully nearby, advertising itself as a Cleaner, Protector, Lubricant, and Finish, all in one. Accompanying it stood a bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap, regular soap, bottles of isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, a set of steel, brass, and polymer brushes, a tidy pile of sandpaper squares organized by grit, various sponges and small fabric squares folded like towels, a little tub of buffing wax, and a basket of various additional supplies, ranging from pin needles to dental floss, which under various circumstances might possibly make for improvised cleaning tools.

The trap was set, and everything about it looked utterly perfect.

So of course Starscream either didn't seem to notice or care. After re-heating the water twice, Sam eventually got up and went about on a hunt for where her housemate could possibly be, trying to determine whether he was intentionally avoiding her.

He could have been anywhere—he was physically capable of squeezing into any one of a number of construction-related holes in the wall and disappearing into the guts of the house—but she doubted he'd be much interested in becoming acquainted with all that wood dust, fiberglass, and the occasional mouse carcass. No, Sam suspected he was on top of something, in a position to lord over the house. 

That was why, over an hour later, she was a little surprised to find him curled up on a baseboard heater behind the couch. 

Apparently even Winglords could crave a warm cubbyhole to curl up in. Well, this search had been a waste of time: Sam didn't feel comfortable cornering him down there; she'd simply have to wait for him to wake up naturally. Had he been up all night? Was he sick? Sam wasn't entirely clear on how many hours qualified as a normal night's 'recharge' for Cybertronians. 

Maybe she could blast some kind of music to annoy him into greeting the morning? Or put on a loud episode of Transformers Prime? Or maybe she ought to find a hand towel and push it behind the couch to work as a makeshift blanket, and let the poor thing sleep?

"What," demanded a voice she'd been hoping to hear all morning. Woops, she'd woken him up. Sam paused at the threshold to the kitchen, looking back over her shoulder, tracking the sound of sharp heel struts on the ground.

"Oh hey," she waved. "I didn't mean to wake you."

" 'Didn't mean to wake you,' " he mimicked snidely. "The racket of you pushing around boxes for the better part of a _joor_ begs to differ. You were looking for me. _Why_?"

Sam had been running power tools for the better part of the week, but didn't dispute the alleged noise level of 'moving around a bunch of boxes' for an hour. Starscream had apparently been awake the entire time, and perfectly aware she was searching for him, and had deliberately declined to show himself; only to immediately demand her attention the instant she'd found and neglected to disturb his 'sleep.'

"I," she sputtered and deflated, because the scene in the dining room had been intended as a surprise Starscream was meant to stumble upon, "bought you some metal polish, and then figured I might as well heat up some more bath water, but then probably went a little overboard dolling everything up to look like a miniature spa day, and then got super anxious waiting for you to find it."

Red eyes squinted at her from the floor. 

Sam hung her head in defeat. "Yeah, I'll just go put everything away now."

"You will do no such thing. Kneel."

Sam lifted her head, almost bent down to his level, but successfully caught herself in time and raised a brow at him instead. 

He waited a moment, looked briefly irritated, and then sighed. "Very well. _Please_ kneel."

* * *

If the way Starscream's white tongue passed briefly between his lips was any indication, he found the layout of the china bowl spa day to be just as delectable as she had intended it. She held down her hand so he could disembark into the sunbeams without use of his thrusters, and then picked up the water pitcher to pour it. 

He took a moment to study the Eezox, so she set out an old medicine cup and poured a small amount into it so he could dip his fingers in an examine the consistency. He sniffed at it, and then grew a smirk. 

"This is for _after_ the bath," he announced. "Not remotely miscible in water. Different solvents, different purposes..."

Sam was already putting small sample cups of every other soap and cleaning solution she had. Starscream wrinkled his nose contemptuously at the vinegar, set aside the isopropyl for later, and surprised her by going for Murphy's Oil Soap over Dawn's. Apparently other organic chemicals were still suspect, but the oily soap stuff that smelled like pine had gotten his seal of approval, so she swiftly mixed it in

"Hmm." He was glancing up and down the sand paper pads, and even touched the grit of one. His wings bobbed down, and Sam felt he looked suddenly, briefly, _intensely_ tired. Then the body language was gone, the wings were back up, and he was turning his nose up to the manual labor required to buff out scratches with sand paper. Internal Sam patted Other Internal Sam's back: Her trap was working perfectly, muahahaha.

"Are you going to want to strip oil off yourself before the polishing part?" she asked after stepping back to offer him the bowl.

"Yes," he sighed as he slipped into the water, "But for an actual _soak,_ I don't want detergents and nothing _but_ detergents penetrating my seams... Leaves everything dry. Chafes."

"Maybe next time I can fill up a vat of warm mineral oil for you after soaking, or something," Sam mused, and she saw little silver-red wings flick in interest. He even went so far as to curl some of those clawed little fingers thoughtfully at his chin. Sam filed the mineral oil plan away for later. Things were going well!

This was the most they'd spoken in days, and it was on a topic they both seemed to enjoy. Starscream was once more looking positively decadent in all that foam. Sam angsted over whether to pull out her phone and take another picture. He would _absolutely_ notice, this time. If he kicked up those heels of his on the rim again, she was going to cave. 

"What?" he demanded.

Instead of admitting how much she enjoyed looking at him, Sam reached over, pinched up one of his energon cubes, and offered it to him. "Have yourself some breakfast, tiny fiend," she encouraged. "And enjoy the sunshine while it lasts. We're heading into winter.

His mouth quirked down. 

Sam made a mental note of that reaction, and referenced it back to how she'd found him on the baseboard heating element that morning, and reference _that_ back to how he'd twice expressed affection for basking on a full tank of fuel. She tried to busy herself capping bottles and looking busy, and then left the room trying to act like she didn't have any more surprises up her sleeves.

(Was Starscream cold?)

"Hey Starscream?" she called from the kitchen as she picked up the heavy duty plastic case housing her newest power tool. 

"What is the point of telling me to relax and then _shouting_?" he muttered, and nevermind that his normal speaking voice was loud enough to be heard from the opposite side of the house. 

"I need your opinion on something," she said, and came straight back into the dining room. She set the case on the table, unclasped and opened it, and then began taking out the various pieces from within. 

Starscream was already halfway disappeared into his soup bowl, with only his optics above the water/foam level, and he was watching her with a tired boredom, even as she pulled out the Dremel tool and showed it to him. Apparently he couldn't sense her excitement, but he did prop himself up a few millimeters so he could speak:

"Why do you think I have any opinion to _give_ about your primitive carpentry machines?"

"It's a precision rotary tool," she explained, equipping the buffing wheel and gesturing with the little red and green bars of jeweler's rouge and green compound that had come with it. "And these are fine polishing compounds. It also came with some sandpaper wheels of different grits, and felt buffing pads, and I figured if it was gentle enough to touch up fine details on jewelry, it at least wouldn't hurt you."

Starscream stared at her from about water level for a long,

effing,

time.

"Thoughts...?" Sam prompted gently. She wasn't going to plug the thing in and definitely wasn't going to turn it on unless she got the all-clear from Mr. Winglord. She had little doubt that power tools could be intimidating, especially when someone was suggesting they could be _used on you_. People freaked out at the sound of dental drills for a reason. 

Starscream reached out of the water and around the rim of the soup bowl to push himself to a seat. For a moment, he looked _angry,_ and she was worried they'd had another cultural miscommunication like they'd had over the 'dirty' thing. His wings were stiff, his mouth was a thin line, and his eyes were sharp. She thought he was going to get up, and get out of the bowl, and tell her all the ways she'd horribly offended him, and stomp off. 

Instead, he remained in that tightly crimped, angry (distressed?) looking posture for half a minute more...

... and then slowly released the bowl, and held out his hand, or maybe his forearm, as if offering it to her. 

Sam perked up. Sam quickly looked around herself for an outlet! And when that outlet proved just a foot too far away, she discovered Past Sam had thoughtfully provided her with an extension cord. Good work, Past Sam: It wouldn't do to look to look _overly excited_ to be fawning over his majesty. 

She got the extension cord rolled out, plugged in the Dremel, and, acting much more nonchalant than she felt, she sat down in the dining room chair nearest Starscream, to select a bit for her Dremel. "Sandpaper first, or straight to polishing compound?" she asked.

"Sandpaper," he rasped. 

She selected one of the thousand grit disks, reasoning they'd start fine for today, to make sure she didn't injure him. Then she lifted her hand to gently, _respectfully,_ receive the arm he'd extended out to her. She supported it draped across the line between her thumb and forefinger, flicked the Dremel tool on, and then gingerly pressed the flexible disk onto his forearm. 

Starscream reflected upon the sensation for a moment. Then he sat languidly back against the soup bowl, and his optics drifted half closed.

She was careful not to linger too long anywhere. She gently turned his arm left and right, sticking to obviously metal surfaces and avoiding anything that looked like polymer or silicone. He flexed his fingers at one point and reached for the disk, so she held it very still for him and watched as he angled pointy finger tips into the disk. The rough sensation must have been pleasurable or even slightly ticklish, because his wings clicked against the china soup bowl, and his optics pulsed a louder red.

There was a haughty, contented expression on his face: The look of the cat that ate the canary. 

Internal Sam was probably wearing a matching expression. The only way this could have been more enjoyable was if she'd been allowed to individually hold up and sharpen each little talon herself. As it was, she kept contact between them as professional and minimalistic as she could. 

Starscream had other ideas, and, when he was satisfied with his claws, threw a whole leg up into her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 out of 10 Decepticon Medics approves of exfoliation as an important component of any good morning skin care regiment!
> 
> 9 out of 10 Decepticons Medics didn't make it into Transformers Prime, so SEEYA!


	21. Provide for Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The highest quality of service is in helping to make it trivial for me to lie to myself in pleasing ways._

Okay, today Sam appeared to have been granted an implicit exemption from the 'no touching Starscream' rule.

She'd held arms, feet, and even wings. She'd carefully, with a pinky finger braced against him as a guide, sanded the back faces of his helm. Then he'd picked himself up onto his knees, gripped the bowl by the rim, and arched his body this way and that, allowing her to target his shoulders, back, waist, and hips.

The place where his wings joined his body was the hardest part, and she'd quickly given up on not touching him, and lain her thumb on the curve of his back to hold him (and her hand) steady as she worked. He didn't initially complain, but when she struggled to get in between the four wings, and he started wiggling subtly back and forward, she worried she was lingering too long on certain panels and risking the Cybertronian equivalent of a rash. 

She turned off the Dremel, briefly, and picked up the handled brushes, working from hardest to softest, to get lingering debris out of all his interlocking abdominal plates and wing panels. Then she briefly equipped the rotary tool with a brass brush cleaning wheel, and ran it down both of his sides under the arms, and along his lower back, since these were areas she'd never been able to clean before. 

After a thorough cleaning and dermabrasion, his metal was looking a rough matte gray. Sam switched the Dremel to a felt tool tip and lined it with polishing compound, and then the whole process had essentially repeated itself: She went over him, again from fingertip to toe.

This time, she absolutely _did_ get the pleasure of holding his tiny hand atop one of her finger tips, and gently thumbing up each finger so that she could polish it. He was looking incredibly relaxed by that point, lounged in his bowl, barely moving.

He moved so little, in fact, that she wasn't certain how to get most of him _out_ of the bowl so she could polish bits. She started off by reaching in to grab up each foot, and he did not protest. Then she polished the rear of the helm, daring to touch some of the more delicate looking bits like the forehead crest and cheek vents, watching closely to make absolutely sure she didn't hit him in the face. 

He _did_ roll over on his side to expose a wing to her, but then sort of lazily stopped here, roll half-completed, leaving Sam with the quandary of what to _do_ with him. She eventually reached into the (still pretty hot, ow) water and carefully hooked two fingers around his tiny midsection, and turned him over himself. He didn't protest. Wings wiggled, twitched, and occasionally flapped as she tried to work on them. She gently caught one between fore and middle finger to keep it steady. 

Starscream didn't move to help her reach the rest of his body at all. She pushed her luck and lifted him up a bit, so his legs were still in the water but his torso was not.

He lounged there in the cup of her hand, looking plenty comfortable and completely unconcerned by the manhandling. She waited a second to make sure everything was okay and that she wasn't about to get stabbed by a bunch of newly honed talons. Then she bent to the task of polishing, reducing the hazy microabraisons from the sandpaper, plate by plate by plate.

* * *

"Do you want me to change the water and let you soak for a bit longer?" It was brackish with old hard-to-reach grit and a shed layer of alien steel, but Starscream took in a deep breath, and gave a dismissive wave of his hand, propping himself up and stretching luxuriously. 

"No," he said, and cleared a burr from his throat. "No, I've had enough of your water for an eon."

Sam took the cue and offered him a finger to grab onto, so he could stand without risking a slip on the glossy bottom of the china dish. He took it gently enough not to cut her (such a courtesy!) and cleared the soup bowl first with one thruster and then the other.

He released her to pull the cup of isopropyl alcohol to himself, and picked up a little sponge all on his own to dip it within and spread it across his plating. He was likely using this technique to dry himself, while also stripping off any surface residue from the oil soap.

Sam's own job was done, so she removed her rotary head from the tool and began packing everything back up into its case.

Starscream peered over his shoulder at her like she'd gone and done something _suspicious_ by not involving herself. 

But, hey, Sam's oversized hands were no longer required for the operation of a power tool, and he could technically do the rest of this whole process by himself. He had tiny sponges and Q-tip heads and microfiber clothes. Applying gun oil/polish/finisher on a squeaky clean surface wasn't exactly labor intensive. 

Red-eyed suspicious peering quickly metamorphized into a glare.

"Starscream," Sam said patiently as she closed the case and clipped it shut, "I can't read your mind. If you want something, you have to actually ask for it."

HIs wings gave a sharp, deep bob of disapproval. His glower intensified. 

Sam pushed the case aside, took a seat, and leaned back (and tried not to panic when the chair creaked ominously). "We've previously established that I'm not supposed to touch you without an invitation," she explained. "And I'm not eager to get called out for treating you like a doll again."

"This is your concern _now?_ " He sneered like he felt he'd caught her in a lie. "Where were these white-knight sensibilities a klick ago, human?"

"Handling a power tool longer than you are tall was supposed to be helpful," Sam disagreed. "And I asked for permission before ever even turning it on. Then you started bodily throwing your limbs to me. The consent level was pretty unambiguous."

He sneered more at her word choice. " _Consent_?" he laughed. "You get some _erotic pleasure_ out of grooming, then?"

Sam crossed her arms behind her head and got comfortable. "The rules, as they presently stand, state I have to respect your personal space," she reminded him unapologetically. "So, I'm not touching you without your permission."

"You _inferred_ permission earlier!"

"Yeah, sure, up to a certain point, but that's me _guessing_. How far do you think I want to push a guess? Last thing I need is you taking a swipe at me and then acting smug about it, saying it all my own fault because I made an assumption and never technically asked."

"You are being intentionally _obtuse!_ "

"Maybe I'm _unintentionally_ obtuse," Sam disagreed. "If you expect me to just magically know there's a grooming related exception to the 'no touching' rules, then, sorry, but you have to actually _tell me that._ Literally every other interaction we've had on the topic had been a bag of mixed signals mixed with the occasional threa-"

"Just shut up, shut up, SHUT UP, you INFURATING water bag!" he snarled, retaking his feet and stalking partway around the bottles, presumably so that he didn't have to _look_ at her or be looked at by her.

* * *

At first, Sam wondered why it had to be so damn hard just to ask for help, and attributed it to ego.

Then she walked back that line of thinking, and turned her brain around, and came at it from another angle: Why would anyone become _distressed or upset_ at the idea of asking for something, such that they would feel the need to lash out and escape the situation?

Sam crossed her eyes. Sam thought very hard. Sam hesitantly cross-referenced half a dozen stereotypical relationship communication breakdown between obvert and subtle communicators. Then she got up on her knees and walked her elbows across the table, to try and get a look at him where he was sulking behind his bottles.

"Is it that: The act of paying enough attention, to know what you like, to figure out what you want, and then to give it freely without even being asked, would mean I _cared?_ "

Starscream laughed harshly, arms 'crossed,' "You think far too highly of yourself to imagine _I_ give a second's thought to what you think of me."

"You don't want me to _actually_ care," Sam agreed. "That would be annoying. No, you want me to be good at crafting the _illusion_ I care, because being cared about is pleasurable."

Starscream fell sharply silent in the wake of that.

"That's why you didn't get especially angry while accusing me of treating you like a doll. It _amused_ you, and you were getting something out of it, and it didn't bother you that the sentiment behind it wasn't really the _right_ one, because it served your interests. You were getting—loosely speaking—pampered, so it worked for you. But it _doesn't_ work if I'm constantly stopping, or asking questions, because it breaks the illusion."

His wings gave a flick. And then another. He wasn't disagreeing, but her decision to address him in this way was worsening his agitation. Maybe he was thoroughly hating hearing her break his motives down into _her_ terms. Translations between how two people understood a situation were seldom bi-direction, even when they weren't dead wrong. She needed to stop while she was ahead, having secured a near enough 'match' to what he experienced to _do_ something about it. Contrary to all her expectations, Starscream was actually very _subtle_ under that loud and abrasive shell. 

Maybe she could apologize. "Starscream, look, I'm not in a service industry. I'm a terrible liar, and as subtle as a rock. And I'm a freelance engineer and social recluse for a reason: I'm better at figuring out blueprints than people." 

He gave a sharp, irritated little vibrate of his head. "Doesn't stop you from _presuming,_ speculating, and pretending at psychology _ad nauseum_."

"Well, when all one has is a hammer..."

He snorted. Ordinarily, it was an especially fun sound to hear; it used his nose, his cheek vents, and even his jet turbines; he puffed air from all of them.

Under _these_ circumstances, Sam had to swallow back on uncertainty. She glanced back and picked up a microfiber cloth, and then picked up the bottle of gun polish, wetted the cloth, and looked back to him. He'd glanced quietly across his shoulder at the sounds of liquid sloshing in its bottle, and a red ember was partially visible, staring back at her, narrowed. She lowered her head, and turned her hand palm up, and offered it to him. 

He sneered.

"Please?" she asked quickly. "Please."

His sneer lingered. She ducked her head a little more, willing to put on a show if they both knew it was a show. His wing gave one last bob. Then he turned. Sharp landing struts clicked as he crossed the distance back to her, but he ignored her offered hand entirely and walked past her to his cup of isopropyl alcohol, where he sat down and reclaimed his sponge. 

Samantha took a hint, and picked up a slightly larger wedge. She dipped it in the alcohol, and cupped a hand gently around where he was sitting, and she carefully, gingerly dabbed at his wings to remove the residue of the oil soap and evaporate any remaining water. Starscream didn't protest. He also didn't gloat. He was thoroughly cleaning himself this time, with an attention to detail that he'd lacked on all previous cleansing attempts. Each plate, each finger, the grooves between plates, and the softer areas of rubber and polymer. Sam gently flexed his wings and depressed her thumb on each alerion to see if they would extrude for her. They did. She took care of the wings, and his back. She was tentatively swabbing alcohol over his good shoulder when he suddenly spun around.

His eyes were locked on her face, his mouth was still sneering, and his fingers grabbed straight for her. Sam went still in the hops of not being cut. Starscream didn't want her to be still. He got his knee up onto her pinky finger, pressed into her hand, and she rolled her wrist to make a cup for him. He climbed fully into her hand, and half coiled, like a little cobra ready to strike. Sam took a split second to _guess_ what the needed, and then took her sponge and started cleaning residue from his thrusters and landing struts.

His sneer melted to a judgmental line. Eyes stayed locked on her face, like all of this was some kind of _challenge,_ or _test._ She kept wiping on streak free alcohol, brushing as professionally as she could over his calves, his thighs, every part of him she'd already gotten to touch earlier in the day. His body coiled up further, but then folded over to the side; he laid down in the cup of her hand, still staring at her, propped up up on a single forearm draped across her wrist, and otherwise curled up and quiet. 

Sam was meticulous. She moved fingers of the hand she was now holding him with in order to isolate each of his legs, so she could make sure she'd done her job correctly and gotten all the oil off. She looked him up and down to identify places neither he nor she had gotten to yet. And, when she was done, she set aside the sponge, picked up the whole can of metal polish, and _drenched_ him in it. She let it pool and trickle over her hand. And when she was sure he was covered, neck to toe (she didn't want to pour any that might directly fall onto his face), she picked up the microfiber cloth, and started to rub it in.

Glowing optics dimmed. Body language became looser and more boneless. His cheek rested atop her forearm, rocking slightly if she accidentally jostled him. 

She rubbed slow careful circles up and down each leg, and over each wing, and carefully into the many interlocking plates of his tiny wings. When she couldn't fit her fingers, and couldn't grab two ends of the cloth to buff it in, she picked up Q-Tips to do the detail work for her. Her tools weren't fine enough to rub it on his face, so he'd have to do that himself, but she brushed it up and down the plates of his helm, and around and over his sharp red crest.

Starscream never stopped staring at her.

Sam had no idea what he was communicating right now, but, this time, it didn't seem he expected her to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think, somewhere in there, he knows she wants to care. He doesn't believe it. But he knows. And that's why he's instinctively doing this-- because it feels good to be loved on, even if you have to pretend its real, because you're pretending it's not real, because it's possibly real but you can't deal with/believe in that.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like me as an Author you are free to check out my profile, or find me on [Discord!](https://discord.gg/MsSfwNb) Otherwise just leave me loads of comments. I love comments <3


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